The stat
utility prints information about files. You are mostly likely to use it when you want to know when a file was last changed, modified or accessed, but you can also use it to print specific bits of information about files.
Every file on a Unix system has three timestamps:
grep
. This can obviously cause a lot of writes, and most file systems are therefore mounted with the relatime option. This option only updates the atime if the file is accessed and the timestamp is older than the ctime and mtime.There is a fourth time stamp: birth stores the date a file was created. This option is not used (the general consensus is that the time stamp is of no value).
By default, ls -l
shows a file’s mtime. You can get ls
to print the ctime or atime instead (it has a --time=
option). However, it is much easier to use stat
instead, as the utility’s output includes all three timestamps:
$ stat config.php File: config.php Size: 3618 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular file Device: fd02h/64770d Inode: 33599891 Links: 1 Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 1000/example) Gid: ( 1000/example) Context: unconfined_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 Access: 2020-11-13 20:48:42.270076603 +0000 Modify: 2020-07-29 10:35:28.000000000 +0100 Change: 2020-11-09 11:46:48.941657799 +0000 Birth: -
You can use the --format
option to print specific bits of information. This is mainly useful in scripts. For instance, we use a script that finds large files. The script then loops through the list with files and uses stat
to show the file size, date and name.
There is lots of other information stat
can print. As a random example, let’s say you want to know the file name and the time any of the time stamps last changed. You can get that information with --format="%n %z"
(%n
prints the file name and %z
is the time of the last status change):
$ stat --format="%n %z" config.php config.php 2020-11-09 11:46:48.941657799 +0000
You can “prettify” the output by using --printf
rather than --format
. The below command prints the file size, name, last status change and file type in columns:
$ stat --printf="%s\t%n\t%z\t%F\n" *php 3618 config.php 2020-11-09 11:46:48.941657799 +0000 regular file 19576 feed.php 2020-11-09 11:46:48.942657802 +0000 regular file 2540 index.php 2020-11-09 11:46:48.942657802 +0000 regular file 20463 install.php 2020-11-09 11:46:48.942657802 +0000 regular file
There are lots more options – you can find them all by running man 1 stat
.