inode #1

[terryl at tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM]

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
>could be used, since if 0 indicates that a directory entry is free, why
>not use inode 1 like any other inode ?

     Yes, Grasshopper, come and eat from the Tree Of Knowledge...

     Many, many (I mean MANY!! (-:) moons ago, inode #1 was supposedly used
as a file that would contain the bad blocks of the file system, just so the
blocks would never get allocated to a real-live file (I say supposedly, be-
cause I have never seen it myself, but that's the way it's been handed down
by word of mouth throughout the ages....).