vanishing inodes

[trevor]

	A funny thing happened today to a file system I use for my news
spool files. It was configured for 9712 inodes and when I backed it up
to tape using tar 9114 had been used. So I did a mfs for 26000 inodes and
read the files back from the tape. Low and behold only 4366 inodes were
used up and df showed that I had not lost any data. So 9114-4366 have
vanished.

	I seem to remember some discusion of this on the news. Can anyone
shed any light.

		regards trevor    ukc!trevan!trevor