linux - How to Free Inode Usage?

Question

I have a disk drive where the inode usage is 100% (using df -i command). However after deleting files substantially, the usage remains 100%.

What's the correct way to do it then?

How is it possible that a disk drive with less disk space usage can have higher Inode usage than disk drive with higher disk space usage?

Is it possible if i zip lot of files would that reduce the used inode count?

Answer 1

If you are very unlucky you have used about 100% of all inodes and can't create the scipt. You can check this with df -ih.

Then this bash command may help you:

sudo find . -xdev -type f | cut -d "/" -f 2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

And yes, this will take time, but you can locate the directory with the most files.