stat of i-node

[Dave Mielke]

In article <19362 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>fstat() is a very cheap operation.  stat() is a bit more expensive, but
>(with name cacheing) not all that bad.
The problem with fstat is that it requires an open which also does a
name lookup. This proves to be very slow when the directories get
large. I need a way to get the information that stat would return
without the expense of a name lookup. The i-node is the obvious key to
the data, but I am unaware of any primitive that gives an application
program direct access to the data via its actual key. I would
appreciate any assistence that anyone can offer.