STAT(1)

NAME
stat, lstat, readlink - provide a shell interface to the stat(2) system call

SYNOPSIS
stat [-] [-fd] [-all] [-s] [-field ...] [file1 ...]

DESCRIPTION
Stat does little more than provide access to the fields in the struct stat as defined in the stat(2) manual page. Each field that is to be listed is specified as the field name without the leading st_. This and the other two options are described below. All options are then applied to the files listed. If stat is called as lstat then the lstat(2) system call is used, if called as stat symbolic links are expanded with stat(2). If called as readlink then the output is only the contents of the symbolic link.

If no fields are named then all fields are printed. If no files are listed then all open filedescriptors are printed.

OPTIONS

-   If the first argument is ``-'', the list of files is assumed to come from stdin. This is useful for things like ``ls | stat -uid -mtime.'' -fd If an argument is a ``-'' followed by a number then that number is used as a file descriptor whose information is to be printed.

-all
    List all fields for each file.

-s  Use lstat(2).

-mode
    List the mode field. Similarly for ino, dev, rdev, nlink, uid, gid, size, atime, mtime, and ctime. Under BSD derived systems you also have blksize and blocks.

-Atime
-Mtime
-Ctime
    The lower case versions of these three options display the time as an integer that is the ``seconds since 00:00 Jan 1. 1970.'' Listing the fields with the first letter in caps causes the times to be printed in ctime(3) format (i.e., human readable).

EXAMPLES

# Find out the number of links to each file
$ stat -nlink *.c

# sort files by age (much like ls -t)
$ stat -atime * | sort +1

# Find out which file is older in sh(1)
if test `stat -mtime $1` -lt `stat -mtime $2`; then
    echo $1 is older than $2
else
    echo $2 is older than $1
fi

SEE ALSO
stat(2).

AUTHOR
Larry McVoy (mcvoy@rsch.wisc.edu)