Thread by @linuxopsys

In Linux, most people use the ls command to check a file's creation, access, and modification times, ownership, and permissions.

What if I told you there is another great way to display detailed information about files and file systems?

Learn more about it in this thread:

The Linux ls command typically displays basic or chunk of information about a file; however, what if you want to print more information about the file? This is where the stat command comes in.

stat (short for status) is a command-line utility for displaying detailed information about specific files or file systems. It is commonly used to obtain file timestamps.

How to use the stat command:

The stat command has a simple syntax which is similar to that of the ls command:

$ stat [OPTION]... [FILE]...

The stat command takes one or more FILE names as input and has a number of options that control the command's behavior and output.

With the stat syntax out of the way, let's take a look at our first example to display file status such as size, inode number links, and file timestamps:

$ stat log.txt

The command's output will look like this:

In this case, we ran the stat command with no options other than the file name, and it returned the following file information:

• File – The name of the file.

• Size – The size of the file in bytes.

• Blocks – The number of allocated blocks the file takes.

• IO Block – The size in bytes of every block.

• File type – (ex. regular file, directory, symbolic link, block file, sockets.)

• Device – Device number in hex and decimal.

• Inode – Inode number ( uniquely existing number for all the files in Linux).

• Links – Number of hard links.

• Access – File permissions in both numeric and symbolic modes.

• Uid – User ID and name of the owner .

• Gid – Group ID and name of the owner.

• Context – The SELinux security context.

• Access – The last time the file was accessed.

• Modify – The last time the file’s content was modified.

• Change – The last time the file’s attribute or content was changed.

• Birth – File creation time (some Linux distros may not support this, so you will probably see it blank).

Displaying filesystem status:

Instead of getting information about the file itself, use the -f option or the long format option --file-system to get information about the file system where the given file is located:

$ stat -f logt.txt
The command's output will look like this:

The stat command only displays less information when the -f option is used. In the preceding example, the following information was displayed:

• File - The name of the file.

• ID - File system ID in hexedecimal.

• Namelen (name legth) - Maximum length of file names.

• Fundamental block size - The size of each block on the file system.

• Blocks:
• Total - Number of total blocks in the file system
.
• Free - Number of free blocks in the file system.

• Available - Number of free blocks available to non-root users.

• Inodes:
• Total - Number of total inodes in the file system.
• Free - Number of free inodes in the file system.

Follow (dereference) symbolic links:

By default, the stat command does not follow symlinks. When you run it on a symlink, the output includes information about the symlink but not the file to which it points.

$ stat sml-chkf.sh

To follow (dereference) the symlink and display information about the file to which it points, use the -L (short option format) or --dereference (long option format):

$ stat -L sml-chkf.sh

To learn more about symlinks check out this thread:

https://twitter.com/linuxopsys/status/1561171241746083840?s=20&t=56f25YI5oBVMBf62C0rQ_g

Customizing the stat output:

The stat command has two options for customizing the output to your needs: -c short option for (--format="format"), and --printf="format".

The difference between these two options is that when two or more files are used as operants, --format adds a newline after the output of each operand. Backslash escapes are interpreted by the --printf option.

With --format and --printf, you can use a variety of format directives for files and file systems.

For example, to view only the file type, you would run:

$ stat --format="%F" log.txt

You can combine any number of formatting directives and use custom separators between them if you want. A single character or a string can be used as the separator:

$ stat --format="%n-%F" logs.txt
Here combined two formating directives an used the hiphen (-) as the separator

You can use the —printf option to interpret special characters such as newline or tab as separators:

$ stat --printf='Name: %n\nPermissions: %a\n' logs.txt

\n characters prints a new line.

The stat can also display data in a terse format. This format is useful for other utilities to parse.

To print the output in terse form, run the command with the -t (—terse) option:

$ stat -t logs.txt

Refer to the stat man pages using the (man stat) command for a complete list of all format directives for files and file systems. You can also refer to the stat help by running (stat —help) in your terminal.

$ stat --help

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