Shell Programming and Scripting

i tried to use stat to get the attributes of a file and a soft link. but the result i got from stat and lstat are the same.

say:
ln -s f1 soft1 (soft is a soft link , point to f1)

if i use > ls -il
shows the inode and modify time of soft1 and f1 are different.

but the modify time( or any other attributes) are the same (using perl script) even if i use lstat for soft1 and stat for f1.


could anyone tell me why?

here is my code:

my ($fileName) = shift;
open (FILEINFO, "$fileName") || die "$! can't open";

# get the attributes for the file and softlink
my(@fileAttributes) = stat(FILEINFO);
my(@linkAttributes) = lstat(FILEINFO);
close (FILEINFO);

# check if the link is soft link
if (-l $fileName)
{
$hashModifyTime{$fileName} = $linkAttributes[9];
print "^^^^^^$hashModifyTime{$fileName}\n";
}
else
{
# fileAttributes[9] contains the last modify time of the file
$hashModifyTime{$fileName} = $fileAttributes[9];
print "^^^^^^$hashModifyTime{$fileName}\n";
}

I could not get lstat to work at all - it would always give "" for an answer - tried hard and soft links.

Why you get the same info may be explained by the description of lstat on Perldoc.com