running out of inodes?

[roy at sts.sts.UUCP]

/* Written  5:53 pm  May 19, 1989 by roy at sts.sts.UUCP in sts:comp.unix.wizards */
/* ---------- "running out of inodes?" ---------- */
How does one go about figuring how many inodes a filesystem has?  I've
looked around the man pages quite a bit and the only place I find any
reference to the number of inodes is in mkfs(8).  Our system is a
Sun3/280 running SunOS 4.0.x (where x > 1)

The reason I want to know is, every time I do a man command on a
command with a fair amount of documentation, I get "Word overflow." a
bunch of times and finally "Out of temp file space."  I managed,
through the quota system, to find out how many inodes are actually
being used.  It doesn't look like very much, but I don't know how many
inodes are available, so I can't assume.  I do know that there is
plenty of space available on the filesystem (4M free out of 7M total
on / and 20M free out of 143M total on /var, where /usr/tmp actually
resides), so I figure it must be a problem of running out of inodes.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?  By the way, just to convince
myself there really is enough space in /tmp, I re-directed the output
of an offending man command to a file on my workstation (where
everything is working OK) and transferred that output to /tmp and to
/var/tmp.  No problem, but ... of course we all know there is a
problem.  Thanks for reading my rambling and thanks even more if you
actually consider this problem!

/* End of text from sts:comp.unix.wizards */

In case anyone wants to know, the problem did turn out to be an
n/troff problem.  When it said "out of temp file space", it meant
nroff's internal memory and not the filesystem.  The
/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.man file got changed somehow and that screwed up
one particular manual page.  So, the moral of the story is, know your
localisms (and, perhaps, look everywhere :-)

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Roy Bixler                   | UUCP: ...!{claris,sun}!sts!roy    |
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