List all inodes, inumbers

ls -i and stat are not fast enough.

Camelot's suggestion using:

ls -R -i

should be as fast as 'find'. I got so focused on improving your 'find' in my reply, that I totally forgot that ls -R -i will effectively do the same thing, with less junk thrown in.

... so I can compare 2 sets of directories which both have hard links to the same file.

The

diff -r directory_1 directory_2

can do directory comparisons. Not sure if this is of interest or not. "man diff" will give you all the 'diff' options available.

I am surprised the inumbers can't simply be listed for direct access to a file rather than having find run through the hierarchy.

Unix file systems generally DO NOT allow accessing a file via their inode number. They often depend on access permissions in the parent, grandparent, great grandparent, etc... to control access to a file. By passing the file system name space and going directly to a file via the inode number would upset the security balance.

Of course every file system implementation is different, and it is always possible that a specific implementation has a file system specific ioctl() or fcntl() that can do that, but it is NOT a generic Unix feature, short of reading the raw disk, and parsing the file system on-disk structures (also a security violation, so only root or the owner of the file /dev/devicename is allowed to do that). fsck is one of those things that needs root access, and fsck actually has different flavors of fsck for different file system implementations

/sbin/fsck

/sbin/fsck_cs

/sbin/fsck_exfat

/sbin/fsck_hfs

/sbin/fsck_msdos

/sbin/fsck_udf

Some have the inodes scattered all over the place, some have them centrailized, some may have a table of inode pointers, etc.... Again, all implementation dependent. And unless the file system provides an API separate from the file system, generally speaking a user program cannot access a file via its inode number.

I work on Unix file systems during the day.

Not really. There is no flat table you can walk through.

It might be more efficient, to use

find -x /Volumes/thedisk/* -ls

which will NOT execute the stat program once for each file, but rather do the ls -li within the find utility. The inode number will be in column 1.

:: confused ::

What's wrong with:

ls -i

?