Accessing files by inode #s

[Jacob Gore]

/ comp.unix.questions / steve at nuchat.UUCP (Nuchia) /  7:26 pm  Feb  9, 1988 /
>The reason the reference to -inum was deleted is that the concept
>of an inumber relates to one specific (well, two, but I digress)
>implementation of the filesystem.  Thus all mention of them (inodes)
>were expurgated from the SVID.  And since all recent sysV manuals
>are derived from the SVID (choke gasp) they all lack any information
>on how things work.

Hmm.... So we can't always assume that there are inodes...

Suppose I wanted to make a 'prune' option for a program that traverses the
directory tree.  For example, an 'exclude subtree' option for 'tar', which
would take as a parameter a name for the directory at the root of the subtree
to be excluded.  Now, that may not be the only name for that directory
(symbolic links, you know, and stuff like that), so it would help if I could
uniquely identify that directory file.

Until I saw the above message, I thought that the pair (device, inode) will
give me that unique file ID.  Is there a general, SVIDable way to do this?

Jacob Gore				Gore at EECS.NWU.Edu
Northwestern Univ., EECS Dept.		{oddjob,gargoyle,ihnp4}!nucsrl!gore