That's a weirdly phrased question anyway. There's a directory entries reference in the inode that leads to the filename. So the name(s) isn't exactly "not in"

That's a weirdly phrased question anyway. There's a directory entries reference in the inode that leads to the filename. So the name(s) isn't exactly "not in" an inode. A lot of those interview questions just seem to test for "how good is their memory", which I don't think correlates to future performance very well.