Where are all my inodes being used?

Question

How do I find out which directories are responsible for chewing up all my inodes?

Ultimately the root directory will be responsible for the largest number of inodes, so I'm not sure exactly what sort of answer I want..

Basically, I'm running out of available inodes and need to find a unneeded directory to cull.

Thanks, and sorry for the vague question.

Answer 1

If you don't want to make a new file (or can't because you ran out of inodes) you can run this query:

for i in `find . -type d `; do echo `ls -a $i | wc -l` $i; done | sort -n 

as insider mentioned in another answer, using a solution with find will be much quicker since recursive ls is quite slow, check below for that solution! (credit where credit due!)

Answer 2

Provided methods with recursive ls are very slow. Just for quickly finding parent directory consuming most of inodes i used:

cd /partition_that_is_out_of_inodes for i in *; do echo -e "$(find $i | wc -l)\t$i"; done | sort -n