Understanding the command stat

The CentOS command line is full of tools, and trying to learn them all is perhaps a lifetime's work. As with all tasks, reaching the finish line begins with the first step. Our first step will be to delve into the world of the /usr/bin/stat command. By using this command, we can query a file's metadata. A file in CentOS consists of:

• A filename (hard link)
• File metadata (inode)
• Data

Using stat and the filename alone, we can view the complete inode metadata. This is demonstrated with the following group of commands:

$ cd #move to your home directory
$ ls > my_newfile #list the contents and redirect the output to the new file
$ stat my_newfile #display the inode metadata

The following screenshot displays the output of stat:

We can see that the complete metadata is displayed, but if we choose, we can display just elements of the metadata; for example, to display the file permissions in the octal format, run the following command:

$ stat -c%a my_newfile

To...