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I know of this command:

find /path/to/mountpoint -inum <inode number>

but it is a very slow search, I feel like there has to be a faster way to do this. Does anybody know a faster method?

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This is my first time seeing a search using inode. When do you need to search by inode ? – Coren Mar 29 '12 at 8:53
@Coren - it's commonly used if you have a file with, say, a "-" in front. You can do ls -li to find the inode of it, then: find . -inum <inode> -exec rm -i {} \; This is a belt-and-bracers approach to ensuring you can remove the file. Of course, you could also 'rm -- -filename', or rm ./-filename, or rm "-filename". – swisscheese Mar 29 '12 at 10:51
@Coren with selinux, log messages include the inode, but not the full path. So you have to search for the inode to find the file being referred to. (thats my use case anyway) – Patrick Mar 29 '12 at 13:30
@Coren For example when a file has multiple hard links, you've spotted that the contents are obsolete and want to delete the file, but you've only found one of the file's names and want to delete the others. – Gilles Mar 29 '12 at 22:21
On many filesystems, there's no faster way, because the only way to find a file's name is to traverse the directory tree that leads to it. – Gilles Mar 29 '12 at 22:22
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2 Answers

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You could look at the fsdb command, found on most Unices, and available somewhere for Linux I am sure. This is a powerful command allowing you to to access the in-core inode structure of files, so be careful. The syntax is also very terse.

fsdb for AIX

fsdb re-link file on Solaris

While fsdb won't actually let you discover the filename of the inode, it does allow you to directly access the inode when you specify it, in essence "porting" you to the file itself (or at least it's data block pointers) so it's quicker in that respect than the find ;-).
Your question doesn't specify what you want to do with the file. Are you perchance decoding NFS filehandles?

sc.

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Well, I didn't think what I was going to do with the information was relevant to my question, so I left it out. In my case, it was merely a curiosity question; my xfs_fsr defragmentation spits out which inodes it defragments, and one was extremely fragmented (over 5000 extents) and I was just curious which file it was. find works, it's just so slow. – Alex Mar 30 '12 at 7:48
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For an ext4 filesystem, you can use debugfs as in the following example:

$ sudo debugfs -R 'ncheck 393094' /dev/sda2 2>/dev/null
Inode   Pathname
393094  /home/enzotib/examples.desktop

The answer is not immediate, but seem to be better than find.
The output obtained can be easily parsed to obtain the filename.

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I should probably have specified the filesystem type. It didn't occur to me that the method of doing these things would be different for different filesystems. I'm using XFS, so while I'm sure your answer is correct, it won't help me specifically. – Alex Mar 30 '12 at 7:39

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