> The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename. which is not even true in some file systems that can inline data directly in

> The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename. which is not even true in some file systems that can inline data directly into the inode, if the data is small enough. for the downvoter(s): > If the data of a file fits in the space allocated for pointers to the data, this space can conveniently be used. For example, ext2 and its successors store the data of symlinks (typically file names) in this way if the data is no more than 60 bytes ("fast symbolic links") > Ext4 has a file system option called inline_data that allows ext4 to perform inlining if enabled during file system creation. Because an inode's size is limited, this only works for very small files