Output of stat on OSX

Question

I want to use the stat command to get information on a file. I did this:

Josephs-MacBook-Pro:Desktop Joseph$ echo 'hello' > info.txt
Josephs-MacBook-Pro:Desktop Joseph$ stat info.txt
16777220 21195549 -rw-r--r-- 1 Joseph staff 0 6 "Dec 21 20:45:31 2014" "Dec 21 20:45:30 2014" "Dec 21 20:45:30 2014" "Dec 21 20:45:30 2014" 4096 8 0 info.txt

The 3rd and 4th lines are the output I got. This happens whenever I use the stat command. Meanwhile everyone on the internet gets stuff like:

File: `index.htm'
Size: 17137 Blocks: 40 IO Block: 8192 regular file
Device: 8h/8d Inode: 23161443 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) 
Uid: (17433/comphope) Gid: ( 32/ www)
Access: 2007-04-03 09:20:18.000000000 -0600
Modify: 2007-04-01 23:13:05.000000000 -0600
Change: 2007-04-02 
16:36:21.000000000 -0600

I tried this on Terminal and iTerm 2 and in a fresh session. On the same laptop, I connected to my CentOS server and put in the same commands. It worked perfectly. This leads me to believe that the terminal application isn't the problem. I'm on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) with OS X Yosemite version 10.10.1

What is going on and how can I fix this?

Solution 1

Using the -x option for stat should give you similar output:

$ stat -x foo
  File: "foo"
  Size: 0            FileType: Regular File
  Mode: (0644/-rw-r--r--)         Uid: (  501/   Tyilo)  Gid: (    0/   wheel)
Device: 1,4   Inode: 8626874    Links: 1
Access: Mon Dec 22 06:17:54 2014
Modify: Mon Dec 22 06:17:54 2014
Change: Mon Dec 22 06:17:54 2014

To make this the default, you can create an alias and save it to ~/.bashrc:

alias stat="stat -x"

Solution 2

The stat command that you saw from “everyone on the internet” is the one from GNU coreutils, which is found on non-embedded Linux and Cygwin. It could also be the one from BusyBox, which is commonly found on embedded Linux. OSX has a different stat utility (the one from FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD), with a similar purpose but different options and a different output format.

The stat command isn't standardized, so you can't expect it to have the same behavior on all Unix variants. In practice, there's BSD stat, and Linux stat, and many other variants don't have a stat command.

Comments

[Stéphane Chazelas]

Note that's there's no Linux stat (unless you're refering to Linux stat() system call), just GNU stat from GNU coreutils.

[Stéphane Chazelas]

IRIX also had a stat command long before the GNU or BSD ones. zsh also had a stat builtin long (though not as long) before GNU and BSD ones.

[ahmet alp balkan]

On zsh, for some reason stat is a shell-built in and masks the actual stat command. Any ideas how to disable this? (I have GNU coreutils installed on my macOS, but zsh prevents me from using it).