from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
inode
A data structure holding information about files in a {Unix}
{file system}. There is an inode for each file and a file
is uniquely identified by the file system on which it
resides and its inode number on that system. Each inode
contains the following information: the device where the inode
resides, locking information, mode and type of file, the
number of links to the file, the owner's user and group ids,
the number of bytes in the file, access and modification
times, the time the inode itself was last modified and the
addresses of the file's blocks on disk. A {Unix} directory is
an association between file leafnames and inode numbers. A
file's inode number can be found using the "-i" switch to ls.
{Unix manual page}: fs(5).
See also /usr/include/ufs/inode.h.