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14.3 stat: Report file or file system status

stat displays information about the specified file(s). Synopsis:

     stat [option]... [file]...

With no option, stat reports all information about the given files. But it also can be used to report the information of the file systems the given files are located on. If the files are links, stat can also give information about the files the links point to.

Due to shell aliases and built-in stat functions, using an unadorned stat interactively or in a script may get you different functionality than that described here. Invoke it via env (i.e., env stat ...) to avoid interference from the shell.

-L
--dereference
Change how stat treats symbolic links. With this option, stat acts on the file referenced by each symbolic link argument. Without it, stat acts on any symbolic link argument directly.
-f
--file-system
Report information about the file systems where the given files are located instead of information about the files themselves. This option implies the -L option.
-c
--format=format
Use format rather than the default format. format is automatically newline-terminated, so running a command like the following with two or more file operands produces a line of output for each operand:
          $ stat --format=%d:%i / /usr
          2050:2
          2057:2
--printf=format
Use format rather than the default format. Like --format, but interpret backslash escapes, and do not output a mandatory trailing newline. If you want a newline, include ‘\n’ in the format. Here's how you would use --printf to print the device and inode numbers of / and /usr:
          $ stat --printf='%d:%i\n' / /usr
          2050:2
          2057:2

-t
--terse
Print the information in terse form, suitable for parsing by other programs.

The valid format directives for files with --format and --printf are:

The ‘%W’, ‘%X’, ‘%Y’, and ‘%Z’ formats accept a precision preceded by a period to specify the number of digits to print after the decimal point. For example, ‘%.3X’ outputs the last access time to millisecond precision. If a period is given but no precision, stat uses 9 digits, so ‘%.X’ is equivalent to ‘%.9X’. When discarding excess precision, time stamps are truncated toward minus infinity.

     zero pad:
       $ stat -c '[%015Y]' /usr
       [000001288929712]
     space align:
       $ stat -c '[%15Y]' /usr
       [     1288929712]
       $ stat -c '[%-15Y]' /usr
       [1288929712     ]
     precision:
       $ stat -c '[%.3Y]' /usr
       [1288929712.114]
       $ stat -c '[%.Y]' /usr
       [1288929712.114951834]

The mount point printed by ‘%m’ is similar to that output by df, except that:

When listing file system information (--file-system (-f)), you must use a different set of format directives:

Time stamps are listed according to the time zone rules specified by the TZ environment variable, or by the system default rules if TZ is not set. See Specifying the Time Zone with TZ.

An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.