major.io words of wisdom from a systems engineer

Learn octal file permissions easily with stat

2013-12-10

My SANS classmates were learning how to set and recognize file permissions on a Linux server and we realized it would be helpful to display the octal value of the permissions next to the normal rwx display. Fortunately, a quick search revealed that stat could deliver this information:

# stat -c "%a %A %n" /usr/sbin/* | head
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/accessdb
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/acpid
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/addgnupghome
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/addpart
777 lrwxrwxrwx /usr/sbin/adduser
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/agetty
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/alternatives
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/anacron
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/apachectl
755 -rwxr-xr-x /usr/sbin/applygnupgdefaults

The first octal digit (for setuid, setgid, and sticky) is left off for any files without those bits set.