Get numeric (octal) permissions of a file or directory
- 28 Nov 2017: Post was created (diff)
Linux often shows permissions using -rwxrwxrwx style instead of numerical like 0777. When I started using Linux, I only knew Linux permissions from using FTP servers, and thought the numbers were called chmod. Now I can share that chmod is a utility used to modify file and directory permissions.
To get a file’s permissions in octal representation you can use stat -c %a:
$: stat -c %a filename
666
To get the bitmask style
$: stat -c %A filename
-rw-rw-rw-
References
man statman chmod
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