Inode
Inode Table: All files in linux are having an inode number which is residing inside the inode table of a partition. For every partition there is an inode table, so an inode number will be unique for a partition, and thats the reason why we cannot hardlink between two partitions. Inode number contains a file's uid, gid, access time, modification time, change time and size of the file. inode number DOESNT hold a file's NAME. we can retrieve the contents of a file even if the file is deleted unless and until the inode number corresponding to that file is overwritten. The inode number can be viewed with the -i switch with the 'ls' command..! $ls -i filename Script to determine where the inode usage was most : for i in `ls -1A`; do echo “`find $i | sort -u | wc -l` $i”; done | sort -rn | head -5 With this you can Track it down to a directory then execute this command : find ./ -type f -mtime +10 | wc -l or find ./ -type f -mtime +10 | xargs rm ...