Command to find permission in octal value

Question

Hi All,
Is there a way to find out the permission of a file in octal value. ls -l will give in rwx format. But I need this in octal format like 655. To explain the use case,
When i start a script I need to get the permission of file and store it in a variable. Will change the permission of the file during the script execution. The last command in the script should revert back the permission of the file. I am using chmod for doing the same. When I google, I saw a command like stat, but this seems to be C module. Is there any way to do the same using standard commands.
Thanks In Advance,
Veerabahu

Answer 1

stat is also a command commonly installed on Linux, but it doesn't come with Solaris 9. You could compile and install it.
I'd probably use perl for my script, then you can call stat directly within perl while you're doing things.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $file = "/tmp/file";
my $new_mode = 0421;
my $orig_mode = (lstat($file))[2] & 07777;
printf "Current mode of file is %o\n", $orig_mode;
system ("ls -l $file");
printf "Changing mode to %o\n", $new_mode;
unless (chmod $new_mode, $file)
  { die "chmod of $file failed.  $!\n"; }
system ("ls -l $file");
printf "Changing mode back to original (%o)\n", $orig_mode;
chmod $orig_mode, $file;
system ("ls -l $file");--
Darren