Reading file metadata

File metadata is everything associated with a particular file that is not the data itself. That means parameters such as the size of the file, the creation date, or its permissions.

Browsing through that data is important, for example, to filter files older than a date, or find all files bigger than a value in KBs. In this recipe, we'll see how to access the file metadata in Python.

Getting ready

We'll use the zen_of_python.txt file, available in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Python-Automation-Cookbook/blob/master/Chapter04/documents/zen_of_python.txt). As you can see by using the ls command, the file has 856 bytes, and, in this example, it was created on June 14...