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    SubjectRe: Alright, I give up. What does the "i" in "inode" stand for?
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    On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 15:33, Rob Landley wrote:
    > I've been sitting on this question for years, hoping I'd come across the
    > answer, and I STILL don't know what the "i" is short for. Somebody here has
    > got to know this. :)
    >

    Two plausible definitions:

    The Magic Garden Explained calls them "information nodes".

    A really old (1983) Byte Book called Introducing the Unix System has
    this to say:

    A file in the UNIX system is described by an object called an
    "i-node". We think that the name means "interior node", since
    the UNIX file-system is (in principle at least) a directed
    graph. For every file there is a single i-node that describes
    that file, and contains pointers to blocks that comprise that
    file.


    So, what do you _want_ it to mean? :-)

    - Joe DiMartino





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