Suppose we call 'open' to open the file

      "/home/gal/docs/hello.c"
   

How many inodes must be consulted?

• get the inode for "/"; then use it to read the entries of the directory

  The entry for home contains its inode number

• get the inode for home; use it to read the entries of /home

  The entry for gal contains its inode number

• get the inode for gal; use it to read the entries of /home/gal

  The entry for docs contains its inode number

• get the inode for docs; use it to read the entries of /home/gal/docs

  The entry for hello.c contains its inode number

• get the inode for hello.c; finally(!) use it to read the file hello.c

Ugh! Possibly lots of disk accesses!