Question

Using the stat function, I can get the read/write permissions for:

• owner
• user
• other

…but this isn’t what I want. I want to know the read/write permissions of a file for my process (i.e. the application I’m writing). The owner/user/other is only helpful if I know if my process is running as the owner/user/other of the file…so maybe that’s the solution but I’m not sure of the steps to get there.

Answer 1

You don’t want to use stat() for this. You want to use access() from <unistd.h>:

char const* name = "file";
if (access(name, R_OK)) {
    std::cout << "'" << name << "' is readable\n";
}
if (access(name, W_OK)) {
    std::cout << "'" << name << "' is writable\n";
}