tags: files file-system files directories is_child_of: introduction
What is an i-node?
An i-node is a data structure which is used by file system to store metadata about files.
It contains information like name, permissions, file type, disk blocks location and so on.
File system maintains a table in the hard disk to store all these i-nodes.
A directory contains files. These are not the actual files for sure. These are the structure having information about the file. It is a node of 16 bytes out of which, 2 bytes for i-node number and 14 bytes for file name.
Whenever a file or a directory has to be located, it gets the file name and finds the i-node number and then gets the file metadata and the locates the file from the disk.