Readers will be familiar with the idea of returning the permissions of a file using the ls -l command, which, amongst other things, returns file permission information as shown in this example: -rwxr-xr-x *various info* someFile Does anyone know a convenient way of returning the permissions of a file in Octal notation instead of the usual 'rwx..'? e.g.: 755 *various info* someFile I could use any of various filters to strip out the Octal permission from other input, but wouldn't it be nice to have a command returning JUST the Octal permission...if this is possible?

Adapt this as needed: #! /bin/sh FILE=/your/file MODE=`perl -e 'printf "%04o", (stat("@ARGV"))[2] & 07777;' $FILE` echo $MODE -jim

Jim: That's a good solution - definitely TOP DRAWER! Since I'm a Perl newbie, how about an explanation of how it works? I take it 'stat' is an internal Perl function? Regards, Nails

Learning perl from O'reilly covers this in more detail. Basically, the stat function returns a 13-element list giving the status info for a file. ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size, $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat($filename); 0 - dev - device number of filesystem 1 - ino - inode number 2 - mode - file mode (type and permissions) 3 - nlink - number of (hard) links to the file 4 - uid - numeric user ID of file's owner 5 - gid - numeric group ID of file's owner 6 - rdev - the device identifier (special files only) 7 - size - total size of file, in bytes 8 - atime - last access time since the epoch 9 - mtime - last modify time since the epoch 10 - ctime - inode change time since the epoch 11 - blksize - preferred block size for file system I/O 12 - blocks - actual number of blocks allocated Do a google/CPAN search on perl stat function for more info. -jim

That solution works fine - nice one!