How to view a files owner if username is + 8 chars?

I'm a little embarrassed to be asking such a newb question like this,
but how would I view a files owner if username is + 8 chars? Is there a simple ls option (I couldnt find it) to do this? Or perhaps another command I am forgetting about? Other then greping the passwd file, how would one find this information out?

Thanks,
    Brandon E.

The "stat" utility can handle usernames longer than 8 characters. So can the '%u' directive for "find ... -printf ...".

You can get roughly the same behaviour as "ls -l" with:

find $dir -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -printf '%04m %3n %8u %8g %9s %Tb %Td %TY %f %l\n'

except that the above will expand fields to the specified width but won't truncate them if they are longer.

Unfortunately, you can't get the permissions in rwxr-xr-x format, you can't get it display the type (file, directory etc), and you can't get the variable date/time format (i.e. display the time for recent files, display the year for older ones).

BTW, "find" also has an "-ls" option, which is similar to "ls -ls", but that also truncates the user/group to 8 characters.

Glynn Clements <[email protected]>

nice. stat will work just fine. Thank you!

Thanks,
    Brandon E.