A command that shows me the permissions of a file in octal ?

[leonel]

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Hi all,

Does anyone know a shell command to show me the permissions of a file in octal form ?
'ls -l' will not do, as it returns a string in the format -rwxr-xr-x. I need the octal form for that, which is 755.

Actually, I am writing a Java program to monitor some files in the hard drive, and I intend to have it call this command to know the permissions of the file, and I need it in octal form. If anyone knows any way to get the number from inside Java code instead of making a call to the system, it would be welcome as well...

[robvas]

A long time ago I was searching for the same thing, I found a script that does it:

ls|while read i; do echo -ne "$i\t"; stat "$i"|sed  -n -e 4p|cut -f2 -d" "|cut -b 2-5;done|awk '{print $2,$1}'

[mrmilk]

For those who want to have "0755" style permissions with ls I made this script:

ls -l | awk '{k=0;for(i=0;i<=8;i++)k+=((substr($1,i+2,1)~/[rwx]/)*2^(8-i));if(k)printf("%0o ",k);print}'

Just type the line above to get the full ls listing with octal + the drwxr-xr-x style.

If you want to make it permanent, just paste this line into ~/.bashrc file (and use "l" insted of ls):

alias l="ls -la --color | awk '{k=0;for(i=0;i<=8;i++)k+=((substr(\$1,i+2,1)~/[rwx]/)*2^(8-i));if(k)printf(\" %0o \",k);print}'"

Cheers,
Mr. Milk

[manubatham20]

Hi,

I know this is very old topic. But the solution given above failed when there is no permission given to a file. i.e no read, write, execute permissions. Its showing ---------- instead of 000.

Thanks.

[oz]

Hello and welcome!

This thread is going on 7 years old, so I'm going to lock it down, but feel free to start a fresh thread of your own if you are having any issues with Linux.

Thanks.