Re: 'Inverse' chmod?

[Ben Cranston <zben@ni.umd.edu>]

> It works fine from the command line,
> but I tried it in a shell script with no luck.

> #! /bin/bash
> perl -e 'printf "%#o", ((stat($1))[2] & 0x1ff)'

> Needless to add I know as much about shell scripts
> as Hillary does about New York.

Yeah, the problem is that the $ is inside a ' (perl script).
Try something like:

perl -e 'printf "%#o", ((stat("'"$1"'"))[2] & 0x1ff)'


How it works:

Unix shells silently concatenate strings when they are adjacent.
So these are equivalent:

    foo "abc"
    foo "a"'b'"c"

The argument to perl -e above is three strings:

   'aaa'"bbb"'ccc'

where aaa  ==   printf "%#o", ((stat("      note trailing doublequote
      bbb  ==   $1                          argument gets substituted here
      ccc  ==   "))[2] & 0x1ff)             note leading doublequote

So, if you give "dd" as a filename the perl call gets an argument:

     printf "%#o", ((stat("dd"))[2] & 0x1ff)

which is kind of what you want???

-- 
Charles B. (Ben) Cranston
mailto:zben@ni.umd.edu
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~zben