10.7 The stat Function

While these file tests are fine for testing various attributes regarding a particular file or filehandle, they don't tell the whole story. To get at the remaining information about a file, merely call the stat function, which returns pretty much everything that the POSIX system call stat returns (hopefully more than you want to know). Not all of the stat fields are meaningful under Perl for Win32, because they include information not supported by the Windows NT filesystems.

The operand to stat is a filehandle or an expression that evaluates to a filename. The return value is either undef, indicating that the stat failed, or a 13-element list,[10] most easily described using the following list of scalar variables:

[10] If you have a hard time remembering the order of stat's return values, you might look at the File::stat module, first introduced in release 5.004 of Perl. It provides access such as:

$file_owner = stat($filename)->uid;

($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,
 $size,$atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat(...)

Table 10.2 lists each field along with a brief description.

Like the file tests, the operand of stat defaults to $_, meaning that the stat will be performed on the file named by the scalar variable $_.

You can retrieve information about the filesystem of the current active drive using the Win32::FsType function:

$fstype = Win32::FsType;
if ($fstype =~ /NTFS/) {
    print "NTFS -- good choice!\n"; 
}