25.6 Information about Files

This section describes the functions for retrieving various types of information about files (or directories or symbolic links), such as whether a file is readable or writable, and its size. These functions all take arguments which are file names. Except where noted, these arguments need to specify existing files, or an error is signaled.

Be careful with file names that end in spaces. On some filesystems (notably, MS-Windows), trailing whitespace characters in file names are silently and automatically ignored.

• Testing Accessibility		Is a given file readable? Writable?
• Kinds of Files		Is it a directory? A symbolic link?
• Truenames		Eliminating symbolic links from a file name.
• File Attributes		File sizes, modification times, etc.
• Extended Attributes		Extended file attributes for access control.
• Locating Files		How to find a file in standard places.