<p>To grab the inode of a file in PHP, you can use this:</p>

<pre><code>$fs = stat($file);
echo $fs['ino'];
</code></pre>

<p>The problem with this is EVERYWHERE says it's slow and you should avoid it.  So the question becomes what's the fast(er) way to do it?</p>

You could use
```
fileinode()
```
but you should run benchmarks if you think it is slow.