Intro To 'stat' Command In Linux (2024)

2023-06-15 - By Robert Elder

I use the 'stat' command to show file system attributes of files on my system:

stat README.txt

 File: README.txt Size: 13 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular fileDevice: 10303h/66307dInode: 1837700 Links: 1Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--) Uid: ( 1000/ robert) Gid: ( 1000/ robert)Access: 2023-04-10 22:14:51.642526898 -0400Modify: 2023-04-10 22:14:51.642526898 -0400Change: 2023-04-10 22:14:51.642526898 -0400 Birth: -

Many of the pieces of information that are shown by the 'stat' command are also shown by the ls command:

stat -f README.txt

 File: "README.txt" ID: ae86a3cf56bc3662 Namelen: 255 Type: ext2/ext3Block size: 4096 Fundamental block size: 4096Blocks: Total: 23883881 Free: 5196751 Available: 3971958Inodes: Total: 6111232 Free: 5582899

The 'stat' command allows you to specify a format string to selectively output only the information that you need. Here are several different types of files that we can use for this example:

ls -ld README.txt /dev/null /usr /run/initctl

crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Jun 10 10:35 /dev/null-rw-rw-r-- 1 robert robert 13 Jun 10 13:44 README.txtprw------- 1 root root 0 Jun 10 10:35 /run/initctldrwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Feb 9 2021 /usr

This command prints the file type of each argument:

stat -c "'%n' is a %F." README.txt /dev/null /usr /run/initctl

'README.txt' is a regular file.'/dev/null' is a character special file.'/usr' is a directory.'/run/initctl' is a fifo.

This command prints the file size and the number of blocks that each file uses:

stat -c "'%n' has size %s and uses %b blocks." README.txt /dev/null /usr /run/initctl

'README.txt' has size 13 and uses 8 blocks.'/dev/null' has size 0 and uses 0 blocks.'/usr' has size 4096 and uses 8 blocks.'/run/initctl' has size 0 and uses 0 blocks.

This command reports the access rights in both human readable and octal format:

stat -c "'%n' has access rights: %A (%a in octal)." README.txt /dev/null /usr /run/initctl

'README.txt' has access rights: -rw-rw-r-- (664 in octal).'/dev/null' has access rights: crw-rw-rw- (666 in octal).'/usr' has access rights: drwxr-xr-x (755 in octal).'/run/initctl' has access rights: prw------- (600 in octal).

And that's why the 'stat' command is my favourite Linux command.

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