Question

Which option is used with ls command for knowing the inode number of the file?

(a) -l

(b) -i

(c) -a

(d) -o

I had been asked this question in an interview for internship.

This interesting question is from Advanced File Handling Commands topic in chapter Customizing the Environment & More File Attributes of Unix

Answer 1

The correct answer is (b) -i

To explain I would say: The ls command reads the inode to fetch a file’s attributes. One option i.e. -i tells us the inode number of a file. For example,