This sentence is from a Linux command's return,I can only thought it as 'statistics' but it is the noun form rather than the verb form.
unable to stat ./config-2.6.32-431.el6.i686: No such file or directory
Some files were modified!
What does ‘stat’ mean in this sentence
stat
Related Solutions
These are indeed the process states. Processes states that ps indicates are:
D Uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
R Running or runnable (on run queue)
S Interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
T Stopped, either by a job control signal or because it is being traced.
W paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel)
X dead (should never be seen)
Z Defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its parent.
and the additional characters are:
< high-priority (not nice to other users)
N low-priority (nice to other users)
L has pages locked into memory (for real-time and custom IO)
s is a session leader
l is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL pthreads do)
+ is in the foreground process group
You could also find this all by looking in the man page for ps, specifically the PROCESS STATE CODES section.
There are two parts in deciphering what the "raw mode in hex" means; the first is that it's in hex, but access modes are generally described in octal:
41ed16 = 407758 81a416 = 1006448
If you were to look at /tmp, which typically has the restricted deletion flag ('sticky bit') set:
$ ls -ld /tmp drwxrwxrwt 17 root root 4096 2012-05-31 13:45 /tmp $ stat --format '%f %a' /tmp 43ff 1777
and converting:
43ff16 = 417778
The "raw mode in hex" is described in the programmer's manual for the stat function (man 2 stat), noting that they are octal values:
The following flags are defined for the st_mode field: S_IFMT 0170000 bit mask for the file type bit fields S_IFSOCK 0140000 socket S_IFLNK 0120000 symbolic link S_IFREG 0100000 regular file S_IFBLK 0060000 block device S_IFDIR 0040000 directory S_IFCHR 0020000 character device S_IFIFO 0010000 FIFO S_ISUID 0004000 set UID bit S_ISGID 0002000 set-group-ID bit (see below) S_ISVTX 0001000 sticky bit (see below) S_IRWXU 00700 mask for file owner permissions S_IRUSR 00400 owner has read permission S_IWUSR 00200 owner has write permission S_IXUSR 00100 owner has execute permission S_IRWXG 00070 mask for group permissions S_IRGRP 00040 group has read permission S_IWGRP 00020 group has write permission S_IXGRP 00010 group has execute permission S_IRWXO 00007 mask for permissions for others (not in group) S_IROTH 00004 others have read permission S_IWOTH 00002 others have write permission S_IXOTH 00001 others have execute permission
(Strangely, the online man page is missing this section.)
This is a bit field, and we can see that the last four digits match the access mode; the leading digit (in hex) matches the file type, so a hex mode of 81a4 corresponds to "directory, mode 0644", and a hex mode of 41ed corresponds to "regular file, mode 0775".
Best Answer
Unix, and by inheritance, Linux and *BSD, get the "file status" via one of the stat-related systems calls:
stat(),fstat()andlstat(). I believe the original wasstat(). The "status" in this case constitutes what we currently call metadata: information about the file, like ownership, permissions, sizes, access, modification and status change times, things like that.Whoever wrote the error message you quote ("unable to stat") used the name of the Unix/Linux/*BSD system call as a verb. That would be consistent with a lot of the system calls, which have names like "read", "write", "close", "open". In the context of using and thinking about Unix system calls, using "stat" as a verb comes pretty naturally.
So, "to stat" a file, is to get some or all of the file's metadata.