Ok folks... This is purely a programming question but most people who use unix probably know some java so i thought i`d give this place a shot.

I'm in unix.
I need to make a java program that gets the permissions of a specified file and displays them in octal notation.
eg.

• "-rwxr-xr-x" would be represented as 755 in three-digit octal.
• "-rw-rw-r--" would be represented as 664 in three-digit octal.
• "-r-x------" would be represented as 500 in three-digit octal.
  (taken from wikipedia)

Thanks folks

Hey Jo,

Welcome back. Sorry about the delay in getting to your post, I will PM Gar and Madmonkey about this, I beleive that they are our resident coders.

Keep an eye out for their posts.

TTFN

LGW

This might sound mad, but I have expereince in UNIX and experience in Java, but never worked with them togehter, so to be honest, I didn't realise they were not being displayed as octal in the first place.

You can get the permissions of a file using the getPermissions command.
Then it's just a matter of converting the string values to octal, by reading the first three digits in a string, and converting it, then the next three, and then the final three.

For example:
if (st = "---") {val = 0;}
if (st = "--x") {val = 1;}
if (st = "-w-") {val = 2;}
if (st = "-wx") {val = 3;}
if (st = "r--") {val = 4;}
if (st = "r-x") {val = 5;}
if (st = "rw-") {val = 6;}
if (st = "rwx") {val = 7;}

This isn't the full code, but I hope it gives you an idea of what you need to do.

Thanks for that. If thats in documentation i must have missed it.

No problems, let me know if you need any further assistance.

Hey. When i read this post i assumed it was a method from the File class. I appear to have been wrong. Can you explain in more detail please, firstly what class the getPermissions method is from and secondly how I would go about using it.
Thanks.