File::stat

Provides the same file status information as the Perl functions stat and lstat. Exports two functions that return File::stat objects. The objects have methods that return the equivalent fields from the Unix stat(2) call:

Field Meaning
dev Device number of filesystem
ino Inode number
mode File mode
nlink Number of links to the file
uid Numeric user ID of owner
gid Numeric group ID of owner
rdev Device identifier
size Size of file, in bytes
atime Last access time
mtime Last modified time
ctime Inode change time
blksize Preferred blocksize for filesystem I/O
blocks Number of blocks allocated

You can access the status fields either with the methods or by importing the fields into your namespace with the :FIELDS import tag and then accessing them by prepending st_ to the field name (e.g., $st_mode). Here are examples of doing it both ways:

use File::stat; $stats = stat($file);
print $stats->uid;
print $st_uid;
lstat

lstat (file) 

Returns the same information as stat, but if file is a symbolic link, returns the status information for the link.

stat

stat (file) 

Returns status information for the file or filehandle pointed to by file. If fileis a symbolic link, returns the information for the file that the link points to.