[TUHS] inode - does it have a meaning?

[David Barto via TUHS]

In a blog post today I read:

	In most modern file systems, those data structures are
	known as inodes, and their numbers are inode numbers,
	sometimes shortened to inodes. The term is thought
	to be a contraction of index node, which certainly
	makes sense, but is lost in the mists of time.

This was written by a fellow who is reasonably smart and knows
his way around things MacOS, though not things UNIX. So before
I go and tell him that inode really does mean ‘index node’, I’m
checking here to clear the “mists of time.”

I’ve always understood it to be a shortening of ‘index node’.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode) says

	There has been uncertainty on the Linux kernel mailing list
	about the reason for the "i" in "inode". In 2002, the question
	was brought to Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie, who replied:[4]
	
	In truth, I don't know either. It was just a term that we
	started to use. "Index" is my best guess, because of the
	slightly unusual file system structure that stored the
	access information of files as a flat array on the disk,
	with all the hierarchical directory information living
	aside from this. Thus the i-number is an index in this array,
	the i-node is the selected element of the array.
	(The "i-" notation was used in the 1st edition manual;
	its hyphen was gradually dropped.)

Further the Wikipedia article states that Bach says that the word ‘inode’
is a contraction of the term index node.

So is there a ‘definitive’ answer for this, or is it really lost in
the mists of time?

	David

Men always learn from their mistakes how to make new ones.
A.J.P. Taylor

David Barto
barto at kdbarto.org