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Command line users are probably familiar with using chmod to set file permissions in numeric or octal format, such as running a command like ‘chmod 755 filename’, but have you ever wondered how you can get file permissions in octal format?
If you want to see or view the octal number of permissions on any file or folder via the command line, you can do so by compiling the Mac OS stat command.
We assume you have reasonable experience and convenience on the command line, if you don’t, this article is unlikely to be relevant to you. Most Mac users can never view or change file permissions only through the Mac Finder, as described elsewhere (if at all), while this article is for more advanced users.
How to get numeric chmod access values for a Mac
To get started, start the Terminal application from the Mac application and use the following commands:
stat -f% A file.txt
For example, this command can produce one of the following:
$ stat -f% A wget-1.18.tar.gz644
Where in this example ‘644’ is the octal value of the file permissions.
Alternatively, you can use -f and% OLp (yes, it’s uppercase o and not zero), the output is the same assuming the file is too:
stat -f% OLp / Applications / System Preferences.app
The example output of the command might look like this, showing the numeric octal value of the target object:
$ stat -f “% OLp” ‘/ Applications / System Preferences.app’775
In this example, the octal access value for “System Preferences” is 775.
You don’t have to use quotes, although if for some reason you need to escape for a filename or path or scripts, they’re easy to place like this:
stat -f “% OLp” ‘/ Applications / System Preferences.app’
The -F flag is for formatting, you can read more about certain formatting options in the stat output on the stat man page man stat.
In the latter command case, “O” (capital letters o) is specifically intended to achieve the octal output.
Knowing the exact numeric permissions of a file or folder is very useful for so many reasons, and it can be helpful to know this if you are editing permissions for different items or even transferring files on a Mac and want to maintain the exact permissions and actually check it. There are also countless other uses, especially if you use any kind of server from a Mac.
These commands should work the same way by applying octal permissions to almost any version of macOS, MacOS, or Mac OS X, no matter how large the naming convention is. In particular, the approach to getting octal permissions on a Mac is different from the rest of the Linux world, so if you come to a Mac from the Linux world, you need to change the stat scripts to get the permissions exactly in octal format, we’ll deal with it quickly next.
Obtaining Octal file permissions from the command line on Linux
For the sake of precision, we will briefly discuss obtaining octal access values also in the Linux world, where you can use the following to obtain octal file permissions:
stat -c “% a% n” / Path / Recipient / File
You can also use the stat -c command more simply:
stat -c% a /Path/To/File.txt
The result of the numeric value is the same regardless of the destination file entered, of course.
Again, these last two approaches are linux-specific, and you must use the methods described above to get octal values for file permissions on Mac OS.
Do you know of other methods or approaches for retrieving the numeric value of file permissions on a Mac? Share them in the comments below!
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