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Just started reading a bit about the linux file system. In several places I found quotes like this one:

Unix directories are lists of association structures, each of which contains one filename and one inode number.

So I expected to find out that each directory would contain the names of the files under it, with each file mapped to an inode. But when I do vim directory_name in ubuntu, I get something like this:

" ============================================================================
" Netrw Directory Listing                                        (netrw v156)
"   /Users/user/workspace/folder
"   Sorted by      name
"   Sort sequence: [\/]$,\<core\%(\.\d\+\)\=\>,\.h$,\.c$,\.cpp$,\~\=\*$,*,\.o$,\.obj$,\.info$,\.swp$,\.bak$,\~$
"   Quick Help: <F1>:help  -:go up dir  D:delete  R:rename  s:sort-by  x:special
" ==============================================================================
../
./
folder1/
folder2/
file1
file2

I expected to see an inode number next to each file name, why isn't this the case?

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  • 3
    vim is not showing you the internal directory structure. When you do vim directory/, it behaves like a file browser allowing you to explore the file system. To see the inode number, run ls -li. Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 16:05

3 Answers 3

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That quote is about how (logically—the actual structures are often very different nowadays) Unix filesystems work. And you can see the inode numbers with, for example, the -i flag to ls:

$ ls -li
total 8
532028 -rw-r--r-- 1 anthony anthony 115 Apr 25 12:07 a
532540 -rw-r--r-- 1 anthony anthony  70 Apr 25 12:07 b

That number on the left is the inode. And if I run ln b c (creating a hardlink), then:

$ ls -li
total 12
532028 -rw-r--r-- 1 anthony anthony 115 Apr 25 12:07 a
532540 -rw-r--r-- 2 anthony anthony  70 Apr 25 12:07 b
532540 -rw-r--r-- 2 anthony anthony  70 Apr 25 12:07 c

The permissions & size are part of the inode, not the directory. Easy enough to see by what happens after chmod 0600 c:

$ ls -li
total 12
532028 -rw-r--r-- 1 anthony anthony 115 Apr 25 12:07 a
532540 -rw------- 2 anthony anthony  70 Apr 25 12:07 b
532540 -rw------- 2 anthony anthony  70 Apr 25 12:07 c

both b and c changed, because they share the same inode.

However, the kernel only exposes the filesystem to userspace over a well-defined API (except for the raw devices like /dev/sda1). It gives userspace access to a bunch of syscalls to do things like create and remove links, change permissions, read and write to files, rename, etc. It does not expose the raw, underlying filesystem data structures to userspace. That's for a bunch of good reasons: it allows network file systems, it means the kernel can enforce permissions and keep the filesystem data structures correct, it means you can use different filesystems (with different data structures) without having to change user space.

So, basically, vim dir is just showing you a directory listing—more or less just like ls does. It's done via a vim module called Netrw, as it says up top (try :help netrw in vim). You can't actually edit the underlying filesystem data structures.

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  • Early versions of Unix did let you read directories as if they were files. But the advent of network file systems resulted in an API layer being added, and directories were made unreadable. Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 16:53
  • @Barmar Interesting bit of history... but I'm not sure it's really relevant to OP's question... Well, I guess it's another reason for the behavior. I'll add that. Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 17:00
  • It's more a comment on your reasoning "to keep the filesystem data structures correct". Read-only access can't harm data structures. Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 17:02
  • Another reason for not exposing the structure of the filesystem directories is that it is an internal implementation detail, and just about every file system type has its own, different structure. Some file systems even support more than one structure (Ext3 and Ext4).Things have evolved since the early days of 16-byte records, with 2-byte inode numbers and 14-byte file names. For information on how the Ext4 files system stores directory entries, see Ext4 Disk Layout Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 18:16
  • @JohanMyréen right, noted. That's yet another reason (sort of related to the network filesystem reason, I guess) Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 18:59
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A directory is, semantically speaking, a mapping from file name to inode. This is how the directory tree abstraction is designed, corresponding to the interface between applications and filesystems. Applications can designate files by name and enumerate the list of files in a directory, and each file has a unique designator which is called an “inode”.

How this semantics is implemented depends on the filesystem type. It's up to each filesystem how the directory is encoded. In most Unix filesystems, a directory is a mapping from filenames to inode numbers, and there's a separate table mapping inode numbers to inode data. (The inode data contains file metadata such as permissions and timestamps, the location of file contents, etc.) The mapping can be a list, a hash table, a tree...

You can't see this mapping with Vim. Vim doesn't show the storage area that represents the directory. Linux, like many other modern Unix systems, doesn't allow applications to see the directory representation directly. Directories act like ordinary files when it comes to their directory entry and to their metadata, but not when it comes to their content. Applications read from ordinary file with system calls such as open, read, write, close; for directories there are other system calls: opendir, readdir, closedir, and modifying a directory is done by creating, moving and deleting files. An application like cat uses open, read, close to read a file's content; an application like ls uses opendir, readdir, closedir to read a directory's content. Vim normally works like cat to read a file's content, but if you ask it to open a directory, it works like ls and prints the data in a nicely-formatted way.

If you want to see what a directory looks like under the hood, you can use a tool such as debugfs for ext2/ext3/ext4. Make sure you don't modify anything! A tool like debugfs bypasses the filesystem and can destroy it utterly. The ext2/ext3/ext4 debugfs is safe because it's in read-only mode unless you explicitly allow writing through a command line option.

# debugfs /dev/root
debugfs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
debugfs: dump / /tmp/root.bin
debugfs: quit
# od -t x1 /tmp/root.bin

You'll see the names of the directory entries in / amidst a bunch of other characters, some unprintable. To make sense of it, you'd need to know the details of the filesystem format.

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I suspect you may be reading a really, really old exposition of how the Unix file system works. What you describe would have been true in the late 1970s or so, but it is no longer true on any modern file system.

On many modern platforms, there are several file systems in common use, and each of them hides its internals from user space. You can find out what they look like and play around with them, but unless you want to specialize in designing file systems, it's perhaps better to just trust the book's author to give you enough to have a basic understanding of the design, without getting into too much detail (some of which will be obsolete by the time you need it again anyway).

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    Why do you think that text is old? It applies equally well today. It describes the semantics of a directory, not what you see when you open it in vim. Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 21:42
  • Tutorials used to say you could do things like cat . and it used to be true. It was used to demonstrate the "everything is a file" concept IIRC. Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 4:04
  • Yes but that's not what this sentence says. A directory associates filenames to inode numbers in just about any filesystem that supports hard links. Being able to see a concrete representation of that association with cat is a different claim that this sentence does not make. Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 7:18
  • The idea that you could visit a directory in vim seems to suggest that the OP might have come across this idea. I agree that it's not evident from the question that this is actually the case. I just wanted to post an answer which includes this background in case others have the same problem Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 7:20

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