The stat command in Linux: view detailed file information

Introduction

In the day-to-day work of a system administrator or a developer working in Linux environments, knowing a file’s metadata is as important as knowing its content. While commands like ls or find give us a general overview, the stat command allows us to delve deeper and extract detailed information that often goes unnoticed. In this article we will explore what stat is, how its syntax works, what options it offers, and how to interpret each of the fields it returns.

What is stat?

The stat command belongs to the GNU coreutils basic utilities package and is responsible for displaying the status of a file or filesystem. Unlike ls -l, which shows a readable but limited format, stat presents all the attributes that the kernel maintains in the inode: permissions,

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Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional para Francesc Roig francesc@vivaldi.net .