Understanding CHMOD

[P at draigBrady.com]

Fuzzyman wrote:
> Ok.... so I might be a windoze user trying to program CGIs for a Linux
> server.... but Python doesn't seem to go out of it's way to make
> understanding file attributes difficult. The python manual is
> appalling in this are a :-(

agreed

> Anyway - I think I've finally worked out that the correct way to get
> (rather than set) the mode of a file is :
> 
> from stat import *
> S_IMODE(os.stat(filepath)[ST_MODE])
> 
> Obvious huh !
> 
> The result will be some bitmasked combination of the following ?
> 
> statlist = [S_ISUID, S_ISGID, S_ENFMT, S_ISVTX, S_IREAD, S_IWRITE,
> S_IEXEC, S_IRWXU, S_IRUSR, S_IWUSR, S_IXUSR, S_IRWXG,
>  S_IRGRP, S_IWGRP, S_IXGRP, S_IRWXO, S_IROTH, S_IWOTH, S_IXOTH]
> 
> Which mean ??????
> 
> Having obtained a result from S_IMODE(os.stat(filepath)[ST_MODE]), how
> do I work out what it means ?

These are the basic access permissions.

S_IRGRP
S_IROTH
S_IRUSR

S_IWGRP
S_IWOTH
S_IWUSR

S_IXGRP
S_IXOTH
S_IXUSR

There are some shortcut (confusing IMHO) entries:

S_IEXEC  = S_IXUSR
S_IWRITE = S_IWUSR
S_IREAD  = S_IRUSR

S_IRWXG  = stat.S_IRGRP | stat.S_IWGRP | stat.S_IXGRP
S_IRWXO  = stat.S_IROTH | stat.S_IWOTH | stat.S_IXOTH
S_IRWXU  = stat.S_IRUSR | stat.S_IWUSR | stat.S_IXUSR

The rest are "extended" attribute bits
and file type bits.

Here's a simplified ls access listing in python:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import stat
import os

filename=sys.argv[1]
mode=stat.S_IMODE(os.lstat(filename)[stat.ST_MODE])
perms="-"
for who in "USR", "GRP", "OTH":
     for what in "R", "W", "X":
         if mode & getattr(stat,"S_I"+what+who):
             perms=perms+what.lower()
         else:
             perms=perms+"-"
print perms + " " + filename

-- 
Pádraig Brady - http://www.pixelbeat.org