Checking File Permissions in Linux with Python

I’m writing a script to check permissions of files in user’s directories and if they’re not acceptable I’ll be warning them, but I want to check permissions of not just the logged in user, but also group and others. How can i do this? It seems to me that os.access() in Python can only check the permissions for the user running the script.

Answer

You’re right that os.access, like the underlying access syscall, checks for a specific user (real rather than effective IDs, to help out with suid situations).

os.stat is the right way to get more general info about a file, including permissions per user, group, and others. The st_mode attribute of the object that os.stat returns has the permission bits for the file.

To help interpret those bits, you may want to use the stat module. Specifically, you’ll want the bitmasks defined here, and you’ll use the & operator (bit-and) to use them to mask out the relevant bits in that st_mode attribute — for example, if you just need a True/False check on whether a certain file is group-readable, one approach is:

import os
import stat

def isgroupreadable(filepath):
  st = os.stat(filepath)
  return bool(st.st_mode & stat.S_IRGRP)

Take care: the os.stat call can be somewhat costly, so make sure to extract all info you care about with a single call, rather than keep repeating calls for each bit of interest;-).