File::stat (Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition)

8.109. 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.