Work with blocks

The ipfs add command will create a Merkle DAG out of the data in the files you specify. It follows the UnixFS data format (opens new window) when doing this. This means that your files are broken down into blocks, and then arranged in a tree-like structure using 'link nodes' to tie them together. A given file's 'hash' is actually the hash of the root (uppermost) node in the DAG. For a given DAG, you can easily view the sub-blocks under it with ipfs ls.

For example:

# Ensure this file is larger than 256k.
ipfs add alargefile
ipfs ls thathash

The above command should print out something like:

[email protected] ~> ipfs ls qms2hjwx8qejwm4nmwu7ze6ndam2sfums3x6idwz5myzbn
> qmv8ndh7ageh9b24zngaextmuhj7aiuw3scc8hkczvjkww 7866189
> qmuvjja4s4cgyqyppozttssquvgcv2n2v8mae3gnkrxmol 7866189
> qmrgjmlhlddhvxuieveuuwkeci4ygx8z7ujunikzpfzjuk 7866189
> qmrolalcquyo5vu5v8bvqmgjcpzow16wukq3s3vrll2tdk 7866189
> qmwk51jygpchgwr3srdnmhyerheqd22qw3vvyamb3emhuw 5244129

This shows all of the immediate sub-blocks of your file, as well as the size of them and their children on the disk.

What to do with blocks

If you feel adventurous, you can get a lot of different information out of these different blocks. You can use the sub-block hashes as input to ipfs cat to see only the data in any given sub-tree (the data of that block and its children). To see just the data of a given block and not its children, use ipfs block get. But be careful, as ipfs block get on an intermediate block will print out the raw binary data of its DAG structure to your screen.

The command ipfs block stat will tell you the exact size of a given block (without its children), and ipfs refs will tell you all the children of that block. Similarly, ipfs ls or ipfs object links will show you all children and their sizes. ipfs refs is a more suitable command for scripting something to run on each child block of a given object.

Blocks vs objects

In IPFS, a block refers to a single unit of data, identified by its key (hash). A block can be any sort of data, and does not necessarily have any sort of format associated with it. An object, on the other hand, refers to a block that follows the Merkle DAG protobuf data format. It can be parsed and manipulated via the ipfs object command. Any given hash may represent an object or a block.

Create a block from scratch

Creating your own blocks is easy! Simply put your data in a file and run ipfs block put <yourfile> on it. Or you can pipe your file data into ipfs block put, like so:

echo "This is some data" | ipfs block put
> QmfQ5QAjvg4GtA3wg3adpnDJug8ktA1BxurVqBD8rtgVjM

ipfs block get QmfQ5QAjvg4GtA3wg3adpnDJug8ktA1BxurVqBD8rtgVjM
> This is some data

Note: When making your own block data, you won't be able to read the data with ipfs cat. This is because you are inputting raw data without the UnixFS data format. To read raw blocks, use ipfs block get as shown in the example.