coreutils: stat invocation
14.3 ‘stat’: Report file or file system status
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‘stat’ displays information about the specified file(s). Synopsis:
stat [OPTION]... [FILE]...
With no option, ‘stat’ reports all information about the given files.
But it also can be used to report the information of the file systems
the given files are located on. If the files are links, ‘stat’ can also
give information about the files the links point to.
Due to shell aliases and built-in ‘stat’ functions, using an
unadorned ‘stat’ interactively or in a script may get you different
functionality than that described here. Invoke it via ‘env’ (i.e., ‘env
stat ...’) to avoid interference from the shell.
‘-L’
‘--dereference’
Change how ‘stat’ treats symbolic links. With this option, ‘stat’
acts on the file referenced by each symbolic link argument.
Without it, ‘stat’ acts on any symbolic link argument directly.
‘-f’
‘--file-system’
Report information about the file systems where the given files are
located instead of information about the files themselves. This
option implies the ‘-L’ option.
‘--cached=MODE’
Control how attributes are read from the file system; if supported
by the system. This allows one to control the trade-off between
freshness and efficiency of attribute access, especially useful
with remote file systems. MODE can be:
‘always’
Always read the already cached attributes if available.
‘never’
Always sychronize with the latest file system attributes.
This also mounts automounted files.
‘default’
Leave the caching behavior to the underlying file system.
‘-c’
‘--format=FORMAT’
Use FORMAT rather than the default format. FORMAT is automatically
newline-terminated, so running a command like the following with
two or more FILE operands produces a line of output for each
operand:
$ stat --format=%d:%i / /usr
2050:2
2057:2
‘--printf=FORMAT’
Use FORMAT rather than the default format. Like ‘--format’, but
interpret backslash escapes, and do not output a mandatory trailing
newline. If you want a newline, include ‘\n’ in the FORMAT.
Here’s how you would use ‘--printf’ to print the device and inode
numbers of ‘/’ and ‘/usr’:
$ stat --printf='%d:%i\n' / /usr
2050:2
2057:2
‘-t’
‘--terse’
Print the information in terse form, suitable for parsing by other
programs.
The output of the following commands are identical and the
‘--format’ also identifies the items printed (in fuller form) in
the default format. Note the format string would include another
‘%C’ at the end with an active SELinux security context.
$ stat --format="%n %s %b %f %u %g %D %i %h %t %T %X %Y %Z %W %o" ...
$ stat --terse ...
The same illustrating terse output in ‘--file-system’ mode:
$ stat -f --format="%n %i %l %t %s %S %b %f %a %c %d" ...
$ stat -f --terse ...
The valid FORMAT directives for files with ‘--format’ and ‘--printf’
are:
• %a - Permission bits in octal (note ‘#’ and ‘0’ printf flags)
• %A - Permission bits in symbolic form (similar to ‘ls -ld’)
• %b - Number of blocks allocated (see ‘%B’)
• %B - The size in bytes of each block reported by ‘%b’
• %C - The SELinux security context of a file, if available
• %d - Device number in decimal
• %D - Device number in hex
• %f - Raw mode in hex
• %F - File type
• %g - Group ID of owner
• %G - Group name of owner
• %h - Number of hard links
• %i - Inode number
• %m - Mount point (See note below)
• %n - File name
• %N - Quoted file name with dereference if symbolic link (see below)
• %o - Optimal I/O transfer size hint
• %s - Total size, in bytes
• %t - Major device type in hex (see below)
• %T - Minor device type in hex (see below)
• %u - User ID of owner
• %U - User name of owner
• %w - Time of file birth, or ‘-’ if unknown
• %W - Time of file birth as seconds since Epoch, or ‘0’
• %x - Time of last access
• %X - Time of last access as seconds since Epoch
• %y - Time of last data modification
• %Y - Time of last data modification as seconds since Epoch
• %z - Time of last status change
• %Z - Time of last status change as seconds since Epoch
The ‘%a’ format prints the octal mode, and so it is useful to control
the zero padding of the output with the ‘#’ and ‘0’ printf flags. For
example to pad to at least 3 wide while making larger numbers
unambiguously octal, you can use ‘%#03a’.
The ‘%N’ format can be set with the environment variable
‘QUOTING_STYLE’. If that environment variable is not set, the default
value is ‘shell-escape-always’. Valid quoting styles are:
‘literal’
Output strings as-is; this is the same as the ‘-N’ or ‘--literal’
option.
‘shell’
Quote strings for the shell if they contain shell metacharacters or
would cause ambiguous output. The quoting is suitable for
POSIX-compatible shells like ‘bash’, but it does not always work
for incompatible shells like ‘csh’.
‘shell-always’
Quote strings for the shell, even if they would normally not
require quoting.
‘shell-escape’
Like ‘shell’, but also quoting non-printable characters using the
POSIX proposed ‘$''’ syntax suitable for most shells.
‘shell-escape-always’
Like ‘shell-escape’, but quote strings even if they would normally
not require quoting.
‘c’
Quote strings as for C character string literals, including the
surrounding double-quote characters; this is the same as the ‘-Q’
or ‘--quote-name’ option.
‘escape’
Quote strings as for C character string literals, except omit the
surrounding double-quote characters; this is the same as the ‘-b’
or ‘--escape’ option.
‘clocale’
Quote strings as for C character string literals, except use
surrounding quotation marks appropriate for the locale.
‘locale’
Quote strings as for C character string literals, except use
surrounding quotation marks appropriate for the locale, and quote
'like this' instead of "like this" in the default C locale. This
looks nicer on many displays.
The ‘%t’ and ‘%T’ formats operate on the st_rdev member of the
stat(2) structure, and are only defined for character and block special
files. On some systems or file types, st_rdev may be used to represent
other quantities.
The ‘%W’, ‘%X’, ‘%Y’, and ‘%Z’ formats accept a precision preceded by
a period to specify the number of digits to print after the decimal
point. For example, ‘%.3X’ outputs the access timestamp to millisecond
precision. If a period is given but no precision, ‘stat’ uses 9 digits,
so ‘%.X’ is equivalent to ‘%.9X’. When discarding excess precision,
timestamps are truncated toward minus infinity.
zero pad:
$ stat -c '[%015Y]' /usr
[000001288929712]
space align:
$ stat -c '[%15Y]' /usr
[ 1288929712]
$ stat -c '[%-15Y]' /usr
[1288929712 ]
precision:
$ stat -c '[%.3Y]' /usr
[1288929712.114]
$ stat -c '[%.Y]' /usr
[1288929712.114951834]
The mount point printed by ‘%m’ is similar to that output by ‘df’,
except that:
• stat does not dereference symlinks by default (unless ‘-L’ is
specified)
• stat does not search for specified device nodes in the file system
list, instead operating on them directly
• stat outputs the alias for a bind mounted file, rather than the
initial mount point of its backing device. One can recursively
call stat until there is no change in output, to get the current
base mount point
When listing file system information (‘--file-system’ (‘-f’)), you
must use a different set of FORMAT directives:
• %a - Free blocks available to non-super-user
• %b - Total data blocks in file system
• %c - Total file nodes in file system
• %d - Free file nodes in file system
• %f - Free blocks in file system
• %i - File System ID in hex
• %l - Maximum length of file names
• %n - File name
• %s - Block size (for faster transfers)
• %S - Fundamental block size (for block counts)
• %t - Type in hex
• %T - Type in human readable form
Timestamps are listed according to the time zone rules specified by
the ‘TZ’ environment variable, or by the system default rules if ‘TZ’ is
not set. ⇒Specifying the Time Zone with ‘TZ’ (libc)TZ Variable.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value
indicates failure.
Info Catalog
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