Where are all my inodes being used?

Question

How do I find out which directories are responsible for chewing up all my inodes?

Ultimately the root directory will be responsible for the largest number of inodes, so I'm not sure exactly what sort of answer I want..

Basically, I'm running out of available inodes and need to find a unneeded directory to cull.

Thanks, and sorry for the vague question.

Answer 1

So basically you're looking for which directories have a lot of files? Here's a first stab at it:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 count_files | sort -n

where "count_files" is a shell script that does (thanks Jonathan)

echo $(ls -a "$1" | wc -l) $1

Answer 2

Here's a simple Perl script that'll do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

sub count_inodes($);
sub count_inodes($)
{
  my $dir = shift;
  if (opendir(my $dh, $dir)) {
    my $count = 0;
    while (defined(my $file = readdir($dh))) {
      next if ($file eq '.' || $file eq '..');
      $count++;
      my $path = $dir . '/' . $file;
      count_inodes($path) if (-d $path);
    }
    closedir($dh);
    printf "%7d\t%s\n", $count, $dir;
  } else {
    warn "couldn't open $dir - $!\n";
  }
}

push(@ARGV, '.') unless (@ARGV);
while (@ARGV) {
  count_inodes(shift);
}

If you want it to work like du (where each directory count also includes the recursive count of the subdirectory) then change the recursive function to return $count and then at the recursion point say:

$count += count_inodes($path) if (-d $path);