This is more of a question than a problem. Within the root directory of my school's Linux server, 6 of the directories (/boot, /home, /install, /tmp, /usr, /var) all have the same inode number. The /misc and /proc directories also have the same inode number.

Information given by stat -f shows that each of these directories exists in a seperate partition, so it doesn't concern me that duplicate inodes exist within those systems. I'm curious as to why the OS reports that each partition has the same inode, when in reality they each have different counts of inodes and totally different contents.

My only theory is that the inode indicated is actually the inode to the mount point for a physical drive, but I'm really at a loss here. Any ideas?

The stat system call retrieves a file's inode number and some of the information in the inode.

The exact reasoning for designating these as "i" nodes is unsure. When asked, Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie replied:

'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 became gradually dropped).'