sitz - 1:30 am on Apr 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

To clarify; each file is assigned an 'inode'. You can see what percentage of inodes are used on a given filesystem by running:

$ df -i

Some filesystems (XFS, VxFS, probably others) are 'extent' based, and don't really suffer from inode limitations. Note that the only real solution to your issue is to re-layout your filesystem. You could make a new filesystem on the affected partition (although I'd advise against doing so if it's the / partition ;)) in such a way that you get some more inodes. Under Linux, check out the "-N" option to mke2fs(8); under Solaris, look into the "-i" option for newfs(1M).