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Get file mode in octal with stat (BSD vs GNU)

Time:03-24

I am trying to get the file bits in octal, to assess whether a path is a regular file or a directory.

This works pretty well in BSD stat which is part of my macOS:

$ stat -f %Op /tmp/test.txt 
100644

How can I get the same (or similar) result in stat from GNU. The best I got is:

$ stat -c "%a" /tmp/test.txt
644
$ stat -c "%A" /tmp/test.txt
-rw-r--r--

Right now, the only way I am seeing is parsing the string result and check whether first character is - or is d.

CodePudding user response:

GNU stat has the %f format code for this. Unfortunately, it displays the raw mode in hex, so you have to use e.g. the shell's facilities to convert it.

Notice also that the format is specified with -c.

printf 'o\n' 0x$(stat -c '%f' /tmp/test.txt)

For more details, refer to the man page.

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