The ls command is probably one of the first commands that anyone using Unix learns, but it only shows a small portion of the information that is available with the stat command.
The stat command pulls information from the file's inode. As you might be aware, there are actually three sets of dates and times that are stored for every file on your system. These include the date the file was last modified (i.e., the date and time that you see when you use the ls -l command), the time the file was last changed (which includes renaming the file), and the time that file was last accessed.
View a long listing for a file and you will see something like this:
$ ls -l trythis
-rwx------ 1 shs unixdweebs 109 Nov 11 2013 trythis
The file's change and modify dates/times are the same in this case, while the access time is fairly recent. We can also see that the file is using 8 blocks and we see the permissions in each of the two formats -- the octal (0700) format and the rwx format. The inode number, shown in the third line of the output, is 12731681. There are no additional hard links (Links: 1). And the file is a regular file.
Rename the file and you will see that the change time will be updated.
This, the ctime information, was originally intended to hold the creation date and time for the file, but the field was turned into the change time field somewhere a while back.
We can get some of this information with other commands if we like.
Add the "u" option to a long listing and you'll see something like this. Notice this shows us the last access time while adding "c" shows us the change time (in this example, the time when we renamed the file).
Notice the Namelen (name length) field. Good luck if you had your heart set on file names with greater than 255 characters!
The stat command can also display some of its information a field at a time for those times when that's all you want to see, In the example below, we just want to see the file type and then the number of hard links.
$ stat --format=%F trythat
regular file
$ stat --format=%h trythat
1
In the examples below, we look at permissions -- in each of the two available formats -- and then the file's SELinux security context.
