stat function for perl6

Question

Is there an alternate way in perl6 to get file attribute details like size, access_time, modified_time.. etc. without having to invoke native call?

As per the doc it is "unlikely to be implemented as a built in as its POSIX specific".

What workaround options are available excluding the system call to stat?

Any ideas or pointers are much appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

See the IO::Path doc.

For example:

say 'foo'.IO.s; # 3 if 'foo' is an existing file of size 3 bytes

.IO on a string creates an IO::Path object corresponding to the filesystem entry corresponding to the path given by the string.

See examples of using junctions to get multiple attributes at the same time at the doc on ACCEPTS.

---

I'm not sure if the following is too much. Ignore it if it is. Hopefully it's helpful.

You can discover/explore some of what's available in Perl 6 via its HOW objects (aka Higher Order Workings objects, How Objects Work objects, metaobjects -- whatever you want to call them) which know HOW objects of a particular type work.

say IO::Path.^methods

displays:

(BUILD new is-absolute is-relative parts volume dirname basename extension
 Numeric sibling succ pred open watch absolute relative cleanup resolve
 parent child add chdir rename copy move chmod unlink symlink link mkdir
 rmdir dir slurp spurt lines comb split words e d f s l r w rw x rwx z
 modified accessed changed mode ACCEPTS Str gist perl IO SPEC CWD path BUILDALL)

Those are some of the methods available on an IO::Path object.

(You can get more or less with adverbs, eg. say IO::Path.^methods(:all), but the default display aims at giving you the ones you're likely most interested in. The up arrow (^) means the method call (.methods) is not sent to the invocant but rather is sent "upwards", up to its HOW object as explained above.)

Here's an example of applying some of them one at a time:

spurt 'foo', 'bar'; # write a three letter string to a file called 'foo'. 
for <e d f s l r w rw x rwx z modified accessed changed mode>
  -> $method { say 'foo'.IO."$method"() }

The second line does a for loop over the methods listed by their string names in the <...> construct. To call a method on an invocant given it's name in a variable $qux, write ."$qux"(...).

Answer 2

While looking for an answer to this question in 2021, there is the File::Stat module. It provides some additional stat(2) information such as UID, GID and mode.

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use File::Stat <stat>;
say File::Stat.new(path => $?FILE).mode.base(8);
say stat($?FILE).uid;
say stat($?FILE).gid;