For the record, you mention “the limitations of the number of inodes in Unix-like systems”, but this is not a limit in Unix, but a limit in filesystem formats (which also extends to Windows and other systems).
So it depends more on what the filesystem is rather than the OS. A FAT32 partition can only hold 65,535 files (2^16), but both ext4 and NTFS can have up to 4,294,967,295 (2^32). If using Btrfs then it jumps to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2^64).
Why waste the inodes?
That was my first reaction just by reading the title.
Mostly because I learned the hard way what inodes are.
Read the content. I address that issue.
I know, I read it because I wanted to know too know if it was addressed
For the record, you mention “the limitations of the number of inodes in Unix-like systems”, but this is not a limit in Unix, but a limit in filesystem formats (which also extends to Windows and other systems).
So it depends more on what the filesystem is rather than the OS. A FAT32 partition can only hold 65,535 files (2^16), but both ext4 and NTFS can have up to 4,294,967,295 (2^32). If using Btrfs then it jumps to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2^64).
This is also going to make some devs (me) convulse when a PR is like, “small config change. updated 29 files”.
I have one that has 69 (noice) files changed.
What would you do with billions of inodes?
Run out, far more frequently than you would imagine.