Stat Utility

The stat utility allows you to see all information about either a file or a directory.  You can use wildcards if you want to see info for more than one object at a time.

stat process.sh
File: `process.sh'
Size: 158           Blocks: 16         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 305h/773d    Inode: 98134       Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2010-08-18 11:16:37.000000000 -0600
Modify: 2010-08-16 09:44:57.000000000 -0600
Change: 2010-08-16 09:44:57.000000000 -0600

Most of this should be self-explanatory, but a few items bear explaining.

* Blocks–Each file occupies a certain number of filesystem blocks on the hard drive.  Here, we see that this file occupies eight blocks.
* IO Block–This is the size of the IO block.
* Device–The number of your storage device (hard drive, etc.)
* Inode–The inode number that the file or directory is linked to.
* Times–Note that the timestamps also include which time zone that accesses or modifications took place in.  The “-0500″ signifies the Eastern Standard  time zone.

You can use the “-c” switch, along with the appropriate option, if you only want to look at one particular piece of information.  For example, if you only want to look at the file’s permissions setting, you can enter:

stat -c%A process.sh
-rw-r--r—

To see information on a particular directory, use the “-f” switch.

stat -f /etc
File: "/etc"
ID: 0        Namelen: 255     Type: reiserfs
Block size: 4096       Fundamental block size: 4096
Blocks: Total: 1977922    Free: 1272318    Available: 1272318
Inodes: Total: 0          Free: 0

Here, you see the size of the filesystem blocks in bytes, and how many blocks are free.  Don’t worry about having zero inodes, since this drive is formatted with reiserfs filesystem.  That’s just how reiserfs reports things.  In reality, there are plenty of inodes left for use.  For comparison, here’s how it would look on an ext3 filesystem.

stat -f /etc
File: "/etc"
ID: 0        Namelen: 255     Type: ext2/ext3
Blocks: Total: 9466244    Free: 7530719    Available: 7049849    Size: 4096
Inodes: Total: 4816896    Free: 4586664

With ext2 or ext3, you can see both the total and the available number of inodes.  Since Linux uses an inode for each file, it appears that we can place 4,586,664 more files on this harddrive.