inode #1

[Bill Fulton [Sys Admin]]

In article <352 at anvil.oz> michi at anvil.oz (Michael Henning) writes:
>I just did a "find / -inum 1 -print" on an AIX and a Xenix 386 system. As
>it turns out, inode 1 is not used. The root inode of every file system is 2.
>Can anyone tell me why inode 1 is not used anywhere ?  It seems that it

I heard a terrific explanation of this at the Winter Usenix. During a
Sys5 tutorial, the speaker, who was from AT&T and apparantly very close 
to the code, relayed the following story as an explanation for starting
everything at inode 2:

Back when Unix was being developed (while everyone else was banging rocks
together :-), one of the guys wanted to prove that there were no 'magic
cookies' in his code. At this time, inode 1 WAS the first inode used. To
prove his point, he changed the definition of the first inode to be '2'.
Well, he was right, everything worked fine. Problem is ... nobody set it
back to '1' !!!

Maybe apocryphal, but damned cute story!

Bill Fulton
..!gatech!dcatla!itwaf
dcatla!itwaf at gatech.uucp