inode

In a Unix-style file system, the inode is a data structure used to represent a filesystem object, which can be one of various things including a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the filesystem object's data. Filesystem object attributes may include manipulation metadata (e.g. change, access, modify time), as well as owner and permission data (e.g. group-id, user-id, permissions).