Many Ways to See Numeric Permissions

Chanan Oren (among others) writes:

“You can see octal permissions by using stat. For example, ‘stat testfile‘ outputs something
like this:

  File: 'testfile'
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   Regular File
Device: 307h/775d       Inode: 631410      Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------)  Uid: ( 1000/   orenc)   Gid: (  100/   users)
Access: 2003-07-05 16:38:46.000000000 -0700
Modify: 2003-07-05 16:38:46.000000000 -0700
Change: 2003-07-05 16:38:46.000000000 -0700

The octal permission is in this part of the output "Access: (0600/-rw-------)"

“For simpler output, use: stat -c "%a %n" testfile

“The above command will output the octal permissions followed by
the filename:

600 testfile

“Or use: stat -c "%a %n" *

“To see every file in the current directory in the above format,
one file per line.”

Dee-Ann responds:

I can see how this one would be useful in a shell script, where
you just want to grab the numeric (octal) permissions and the
filename. It’s quicker than having to have the script grab the
letter permissions and then calculate the octal. stat seems to be a popular one.


David Cornish writes:

“The following sed script that I just hacked together (use ls -l | sed -f scriptname) seems to
work:

#
# Directory listings numerical permissions sed script
# By David Cornish (www.davidcornish.com)
#

# File type
s/^([dl-])/1 /

# First value - normal (0), sticky (1), sgid (2), suid (4)
s/(^. )/10/
s/(^.) .(........)t/1 12x/
s/(^.) 0(..)s/1 42x/
s/(^.) 1(..)s/1 52x/
s/(^.) 0(.....)s/1 22x/
s/(^.) 1(.....)s/1 32x/
s/(^.) 4(.....)s/1 62x/
s/(^.) 5(.....)s/1 72x/

# Read (4)/write (2)/execute (1) permissions
s/rwx/7/g
s/rw-/6/g
s/r-x/5/g
s/r--/4/g
s/-wx/3/g
s/-w-/2/g
s/--x/1/g
s/---/0/g

“It could probably be tidied up a bit, but it works.”

Dee-Ann responds:

I’m not a professional programmer, so my code can often stand to
be “tidied up a bit.” Still, it definitely works. See:

$ ls -l | sed -f ~/Documents/LockerGnome/numpermscript
total 120
- 0644   1 dee   dee     396 Apr 19 14:06 addressbook-sources.xml
d 0700   3 dee   dee    4096 Apr 19 14:07 cache
- 0600   1 dee   dee       3 Jul  8 21:23 camel-cert.db
- 0600   1 dee   dee   16384 Apr 19 14:07 cert7.db
d 0700   2 dee   dee    8192 Jul  9 18:24 config
- 0600   1 dee   dee   17832 Apr 23 10:08 config.xmldb

It even leaves the initial bit in place so we can see if we’re
looking at a directory, character device driver, file, or
whatever. If you wanted to make a command alias out of this, maybe
lso for ls with octal permissions, you would type the
following:

alias lso='ls -l | sed -f ~/Documents/LockerGnome/numpermscript'

I don’t recommend replacing ls with this option, but it’s a great addition to the
command toolset.

Sean A. Walberg writes:

[[email protected] root]# rpm -qf 'which kpsestat'
tetex-1.0.7-47.1
[[email protected] root]# kpsestat = /etc/passwd
644

“(BTW, I found this with ‘apropos octal‘)”

Dee-Ann responds:

Funny, I thought I’d typed apropos
octal. Either I did and I blinked at just the wrong time,
or I’m starting to lose it… mind you, some have suggested the
latter to me before. 😉 Another great tool for shell scripting!

Jeffrey Ridout writes with this approach:

find -name "FILENAME.EXT" -printf "%mn" -maxdepth 1

“FILENAME.EXT, of course, has to be the requested file… ”

Dee-Ann responds:

And indeed, that one works too.


Yawar Amin writes:

“I’ve concocted a small ‘awk‘ script that does just that,
called ‘perms.awk‘. I’m
attaching it here for your perusal.

“The way it works is that you type something like

$ ls -lR | awk -f perms.awk | more

and voila, you get the permissions. If you want, you can wrap this
command inside a shell script which takes file/directory names as
arguments.

“The content of perms.awk is:

BEGIN {
 owner = 0
 group = 0
 world = 0
}

($1 !~ /..*/) && ($1 !~ /total/) && ($0 != "") {
 if (substr($1, 2, 1) == "r") owner += 4
 if (substr($1, 3, 1) == "w") owner += 2
 if (substr($1, 4, 1) == "x") owner += 1
 if (substr($1, 5, 1) == "r") group += 4
 if (substr($1, 6, 1) == "w") group += 2
 if (substr($1, 7, 1) == "x") group += 1
 if (substr($1, 8, 1) == "r") world += 4
 if (substr($1, 9, 1) == "w") world += 2
 if (substr($1, 10, 1) == "x") world += 1
 print $9 ":  " owner group world
 owner = 0
 group = 0
 world = 0
}

Dee-Ann responds:

And, yes, another one works:

$ ls -lR | awk -f ~/Documents/LockerGnome/perms.awk | more
addressbook-sources.xml:  644
cache:  700
camel-cert.db:  600
cert7.db:  600
config:  700
config.xmldb:  600
filters.xml:  600
filters.xml~:  644

Phew! That gives us solutions using awk, find, kpsestat, sed, and stat.
Not bad. Not bad at all.