What are the consequences if all inodes are exhausted in a filesystem?

If all inodes are exhausted in the filesystem, it is impossible to create new files or directories despite having free space on the disk. This occurs because each file and directory in Unix-like systems is represented by an inode — a data structure that stores the file's metadata.

Consequences:

• It is impossible to create new files or folders.
• Programs attempting to create files will receive errors, such as "No space left on device" (even though space is available).
• The system may become unstable if creating temporary files is critical.

To resolve the issue, you need to delete unnecessary files, especially many small ones, or increase the number of inodes during filesystem formatting (for example, using mkfs options).