[TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Brian Henning via TriLUG]

I'd go on a hunt for huge numbers of tiny files.  Maybe there are some things you can either delete, or tar up for safekeeping.

Probably not as likely a culprit, but I'm pretty sure symlinks occupy inodes so you could hunt for broken and/or unnecessary ones.

-B

-----Original Message-----
From: TriLUG [mailto:trilug-bounces+bhenning=pineresearch.com at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Delrue via TriLUG
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2017 9:49 AM
To: Triangle Linux <trilug at trilug.org>
Subject: [TriLUG] Reclaiming inodes

I'm in a bit of a bind and have never seen this before so if anyone can explain to me what is happening, that would be great:

I have a machine that keeps reporting that it's run out of disk space.
So I do the usual "df -h" and get this:
username at host ~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        12G  3.9G  7.1G  36% /
devtmpfs        997M     0  997M   0% /dev
tmpfs           999M     0  999M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           999M  9.5M  990M   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           999M     0  999M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup

But it reports that it has no more disk space, so I dig a little deeper and I find that I could also run df with the -i (inodes) flag, which gives me this:

username at host ~ $ df -hi
Filesystem     Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/root        735K  735K     0  100% /
devtmpfs         250K  1.4K  248K    1% /dev
tmpfs            250K     1  250K    1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            250K  1.2K  249K    1% /run
tmpfs            250K     3  250K    1% /run/lock
tmpfs            250K    16  250K    1% /sys/fs/cgroup

I appear to have "run out of inodes"? Is there a way to reclaim them?

Thanks
Thomas