I have stat
on my list as a remnant of the indomitable coreutils package, and looking back I’m not sure why I held it out of the massive missive I posted a month ago. đŸ˜•
stat
has a few gimmicks worth showing. Here’s its basic effort.
Just stat
by itself reveals a lot of information about a physical file. Its size, the number of blocks, the device ID, inode and access and modification dates are all listed there, along with ownership and access privileges. Not bad.
The -f
flag tells stat
to supply information about the filesystem, and not just the file. So in the second readout, you’ll see the type, the free and total blocks, free and total inodes, etc.
Of course stat
has a few other flags that will allow you to fine-tune its display or even customize the arrangement, sort of like the date command. It’s worth checking out what stat
can show, mostly because it’s flexible in its output.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably why I didn’t just dump it into that big list. … đŸ™‚