functions

[kamal_15]

hi all
i want to ask about
how can i use functions like (stat,lstat,..)
in my script?

i writes scripts using sh and korn?
when i type any of this commands in prompt
it return error
sh:lstat : not found

please explain

thankx

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Strictly speaking stat() and lstat() are system calls and you cannot use them from the shell. Learn C/C++ then you can use them. Now you create a c program that invokes stat() and outputs to stdout and then you could use that command in a shell script.

A much better solution is to use Perl. If has both the stat() and lstat() functions built-in.

You could even do something like this:
#!/usr/bin/sh
STAT=$(perl -e stat("/tmp"))
echo "STAT = ${STAT}"

but you would really need to fprmat the stat output to be meaningful too you.

The best answer is to learn Perl and do your scripting in it.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I really should give you a little better example in Perl:
perl -e '@x = stat("/tmp"); foreach $x (@x) {print $x," ";} print "\n";'

This is untested but it should at least give you the fields separated by a space. You should note that the times are epoch seconds so you still have some work to do. Mode would be more meaningful is printed in octal but I 'll leave all that to you.

[Rajeev Shukla]

Here is how you can use the stat() in C
When you use this function it actually returns you a pointer to a structure "stat" which defines all the parameters of a file, below is a simple example which when compiled and run bu passing a file return the inode and the size of the file


#include
#include
#include

main (argc, argv)
int argc;
char *argv[];
{
struct stat buf;
stat(argv[1], &buf);

printf("The file size are: %ld\n", buf.st_size);
printf("The file inode are: %ld\n", buf.st_ino);

}

Cheers
Rajeev