[X-Unix] Can you get the path from an inode?

[Wing Wong]

On 5/2/06, Craig A. Finseth <fin at finseth.com> wrote:
>>    Could one write a Spotlight-Plugin that does something of the kind?
[snipped]
> This is not a cheap operation.  That said, outside of file system
> analysis tools, I've never had a reason to ever want to do this in my
> 30+ years of Unix programming.
>
> Craig

There would be no way of determining what has and has not changed,
inode-wise. Ie, you could do a 'find -ctime -1' to limit it to the
most recent files, but it would still recurse through the whole of the
filesystem to do it. Depending on the number of and size of your hard
drive(s), the number of files and folders in it, and the speed of the
system... the find would take a file to churn and potentially generate
a sizable file in the process.

I would hope that spotlight has a database/caching mechanism, as
opposed to performing a fresh find every time it is triggered. :|

As Craig notes, the wikipedia, and quite a few online sources note...
the inode to file/path lookup tends only to be useful for fixing
filesystems or recovering data. In day to day use, it isn't really all
that useful.

Wing

--
Wing Wong
wingedpower at gmail.com