Is it possible to use stat for retrieving meta data of File1 by passing File1's inode number as an argument to stat instead of the file name?
stat [option - any doing this?] [inode number of File1]
instead of
stat /home/$USER/File1
I mean that directly, not with any piping and command substitution trickery.
Like this one?
sudo debugfs -R "stat <237770>" /dev/sda1
For me, it gives me this output:
Inode: 237770 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x80000
Generation: 3934018986 Version: 0x00000000:00000001
User: 1000 Group: 1000 Project: 0 Size: 3878
File ACL: 0
Links: 1 Blockcount: 8
Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0
ctime: 0x65844b48:c3cc9104 -- Thu Dec 21 15:27:20 2023
atime: 0x65844b4f:d21ab1e8 -- Thu Dec 21 15:27:27 2023
mtime: 0x65844b48:c3cc9104 -- Thu Dec 21 15:27:20 2023
crtime: 0x6584497f:07719290 -- Thu Dec 21 15:19:43 2023
Size of extra inode fields: 32
Inode checksum: 0x6a9c083c
EXTENTS:
(0):2478609
No, by design it's not possible to access a file other than via a path to it, allowing it would bypass access control so that would be a security flaw.
root can possibly do that by using tools such as debugfs (for ext4 file systems) on the block device containing the filesystem (if any) effectively bypassing the kernel to inspect the filesystem structure but doing that on a mounted filesystem is not necessarily reliable; or using kernel instrumentation such as systemtap or bpftrace, though that's likely to be non-portable even between two versions of a given kernel.
So you should use something like:
find /root/of/filesystem -xdev -inode 12345 -exec stat {} ';'
To find the path(s) leading to that file with that particular inode and call stat on them.
With GNU find, you can also use -printf to report stat(2) information about the file.
statcommand and then accepted an answer using thedebugfscommand (which is specific to ext4 filesystems). What's the actual question here?