What's in an inode?

All UNIX files have its description stored in a structure called ‘inode’. The inode contains info about the file-size, its location, time of last access, time of last modification, permission and so on.

1. Type (directory, link, file, b=block or c=character), name,
2. atime=last accessed time (ls -lu),
3. mtime=last modified time (ls -l)
4. ctime=time the file's inode was last changed (ls -lc),
5. pointers to where it is on disk (or target if it's a link),
6. permission bits.

Note the ctime is the time the inode was last changed. It is NOT the creation time.

For example,
A chmod or a chown command will change the ctime only.
A touch command changes all 3 times to now, but
A touch -t command to some time in the past, changes both the mtime & atime to the past time, but ctime is set to now.
A cat command changes just the atime to now. Note in this case, the inode does change, but this change doesn't count as far as the ctime goes.
A > command, changes the ctime & mtime, but not the atime, which is curious. Evidently, atime is the last time the file was read, not written.

Following command will be used to show inodes of file and folders:

ls -i

find out the inode number using ‘ls -il’ command then run below command

find . -inum inode_number -exec rm -i {} \;

1. Inode 0 is used as a NULL value to indicate that there is no inode.
2. Inode 1 is used to keep track of any bad blocks on the disk; it is essentially a hidden file containing the bad blocks. Those bad blocks which are recorded usinge2fsck -c.
3. Inode 2 is used by the root directory, and indicates starting of filesystem inodes.