Red Hat Knowledgebase

Release found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Resolution:

By using the tune2fs tool with the option, -l, the inode size of the filesystem can be seen. Using the same option, other information of the filesystem superblock can also be seen. The superblock contains information about the filesystem, such as the number of free blocks available, and the number of mounts, that may be useful for tuning purposes.

Here is an example how a user can specify the -l option:

# tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep Inode
Inode count: 			26104
Inodes per group:		2008
Inode blocks per group: 	251
Inode size:			128

Take note that tune2fs requires root privileges to view this information. If this command is used by some un privileged user, it will complain the following messages:

$ /sbin/tune2fs -l /dev/sda1
tune2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/sbin/tune2fs: Permission denied while trying to open /dev/sda1
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

To change the size of an inode, please refer to kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_41_10146.shtm