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linuxbashinode

What is the fastest way to find all the file with the same inode?


The only way I know is:

find /home -xdev -samefile file1

But it's really slow. I would like to find a tool like locate. The real problems comes when you have a lot of file, I suppose the operation is O(n).


Solution

  • Here's a way:

    • Use find -printf "%i:\t%p or similar to create a listing of all files prefixed by inode, and output to a temporary file
    • Extract the first field - the inode with ':' appended - and sort to bring duplicates together and then restrict to duplicates, using cut -f 1 | sort | uniq -d, and output that to a second temporary file
    • Use fgrep -f to load the second file as a list of strings to search and search the first temporary file.

    (When I wrote this, I interpreted the question as finding all files which had duplicate inodes. Of course, one could use the output of the first half of this as a kind of index, from inode to path, much like how locate works.)

    On my own machine, I use these kinds of files a lot, and keep them sorted. I also have a text indexer application which can then apply binary search to quickly find all lines that have a common prefix. Such a tool ends up being quite useful for jobs like this.