Programming Perl, 4th Edition

stat

stat FILEHANDLE
stat DIRHANDLE
stat EXPR
stat

In scalar context, this function returns a Boolean value that indicates whether the call succeeded. In list context, it returns a 13-element list giving the statistics for a file, either the file opened via FILEHANDLE or DIRHANDLE, or named by EXPR. It’s typically used as follows:

($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
    $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)
            = stat $filename;

Not all fields are supported on all filesystem types; unsupported fields return 0. Table 27-6 lists the meanings of the fields.

Table 27-6. Fields returned by stat

Index	Field	Meaning
0	$dev	Device number of filesystem
1	$ino	Inode number
2	$mode	File mode (type and permissions)
3	$nlink	Number of (hard) links to the file
4	$uid	Numeric user ID of file’s owner
5	$gid	Numeric group ID of file’s designated group
6	$rdev	The device identifier (special files only)
7	$size	Total size of file, in bytes
8	$atime	Last access time in seconds since the epoch
9	$mtime	Last modify time in seconds since the epoch
10	$ctime	Inode change time (not creation time!) in seconds since the epoch
11	$blksize	Preferred blocksize for file system I/O
12	$blocks	Actual number of blocks allocated

$dev and $ino, taken together, ...