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# Find and identify where inodes are used
- URL: https://www.bagz.fr/find-and-identify-where-inodes-are-used/
- Published: 2016-08-22T08:14:42.000Z
- Updated: 2016-08-22T08:14:42.000Z
- Author: bgazui
- Tags: Linux, #Migrated-1790668826633, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-09-29 08:00

Your monitoring system is claiming that your server is running out of free inodes but your disks are not full at all? Maybe you just need to check your filesystem usage and how many files are being used at the same time... Here are some tips to check and identify the inodes being used.

First of all, you can check percentage of inodes used with this simple command:

df -ih  

You will see inode usage for your partitions and mouting points:

#dh -ih  
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on  
rootfs 120K 7.1K 112K 6% /  
udev 495K 356 495K 1% /dev  
tmpfs 497K 299 496K 1% /run  
/dev/mapper/vg-root 120K 7.1K 112K 6% /  
tmpfs 497K 6 497K 1% /run/lock  
tmpfs 497K 2 497K 1% /run/shm  
/dev/sda1 122K 241 122K 1% /boot  
/dev/mapper/vg-usr 179K 51K 129K 29% /usr  
/dev/mapper/vg-var 242K 199K 43K 83% /var  

Here, we can easily see that **/var** is using 83% of inodes, which is quite high.

Let's now identify how those inodes are used with a compound command using **find**:

find /var -xdev -printf '%h\\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1 -n

You will get a sorted result like this (I truncated to display only the last lines which are the most important):

#find /var -xdev -printf '%h\\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1 -n  
 52 /var/lib/ucf/cache  
 106 /var/spool/exim4/input  
 153 /var/log  
 184 /var/log/apache2  
 301 /var/lib/mibs/ietf  
 319 /var/cache/apt/archives  
 2289 /var/lib/dpkg/info  
 10893 /var/spool/postfix/maildrop  

We can clearly see that inodes are mostly used by */var/spool/postfix/maildrop*. You just have to go in that folder and check if files are useful and/or if you can do some cleaning there.  
Then, once files are removed and directory clean, your inodes will be freed and everything will be back to normal!