Use stat command to display file system meta information of any file or directory under Linux

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PHP has a stat() function that returns an array containing the meta information of a file such as owner, size, time of last access, last modification or last change. It’s basically the stat command under Linux that returns and shows the file system meta information of any file or directory:

stat myfile.txt

Which returns:

  File: `myfile.txt'
  Size: 1707            Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 811h/2065d      Inode: 96909802    Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (1354144/    voir)   Gid: (255747/pg940032)
Access: 2010-02-16 08:00:00.000000000 -0800
Modify: 2010-02-18 04:16:51.000000000 -0800
Change: 2010-02-18 04:16:51.000000000 -0800

To get the meta information of the current working directory:

stat .

Which returns:

  File: `.'
  Size: 4096            Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 811h/2065d      Inode: 96904945    Links: 4
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: (1354144/    voir)   Gid: (255747/pg940032)
Access: 2009-08-31 17:07:16.000000000 -0700
Modify: 2009-12-20 05:18:57.000000000 -0800
Change: 2009-12-20 05:18:57.000000000 -0800