Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

File::stat

Provides the same file status information as the Perl functions stat and lstat. Exports two functions that return File::stat objects. The objects have methods that return the equivalent fields from the Unix stat(2) call:

Field	Meaning
dev	Device number of filesystem
ino	Inode number
mode	File mode
nlink	Number of links to the file
uid	Numeric user ID of owner
gid	Numeric group ID of owner
rdev	Device identifier
size	Size of file, in bytes
atime	Last access time
mtime	Last modified time
ctime	Inode change time
blksize	Preferred blocksize for filesystem I/O
blocks	Number of blocks allocated

You can access the status fields either with the methods or by importing the fields into your namespace with the :FIELDS import tag and then accessing them by prepending st_ to the field name (e.g., $st_mode). Here are examples of doing it both ways:

use File::stat;

$stats = stat($file);
print $stats->uid;
print $st_uid;