Perl stat Function

Description

This function returns a 13-element array giving the status info for a file, specified by either FILEHANDLE, EXPR, or $_. The list of values returned is shown below in Table. If used in a scalar context, returns 0 on failure, 1 on success.

Note that support for some of these elements is system dependent. Check the documentation for a complete list.

Element Description
0 	Device number of file system
1 	Inode number
2 	File mode (type and permissions)
3 	Number of (hard) links to the file
4 	Numeric user ID of file.s owner
5 	Numeric group ID of file.s owner
6 	The device identifier (special files only)
7 	File size, in bytes
8 	Last access time since the epoch
9 	Last modify time since the epoch
10 	Inode change time (not creation time!) since the epoch
11 	Preferred block size for file system I/O
12	Actual number of blocks allocated

Syntax

Following is the simple syntax for this function −

stat FILEHANDLE

stat EXPR

stat

Return Value

This function returns ARRAY, ($device, $inode, $mode, $nlink, $uid, $gid, $rdev, $size, $atime, $mtime, $ctime, $blksize, $blocks)

Example

Following is the example code showing its basic usage −

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

($device, $inode, $mode, $nlink, $uid, $gid, $rdev, $size, $atime, $mtime,
   $ctime, $blksize, $blocks) = stat("/etc/passwd");

print("stat() $device, $inode, $ctime\n");

When above code is executed, it produces the following result −

stat() 2065, 5374250, 1508051555