1. Internal Filesystem or Database Level Information

This section looks at information that can be obtained internally about files and/or other server resources. Using file and system fstat() commands (or using appropriate database queries) one can easily obtain the following information about each file or directory (or datbase entry):

• user-level owner
• group-level owner
• read access rights - user, group, world
• write access rights - user, group, world
• execute access right - user, group, world
• status: file or link, plus mapping to real resource if a link
• last modification date
• last access date
• last file status change
• file size (also available directly from file access)
• position in local filesystem (or location in database)
• raw file content and type -- directory | ascii text | symbolic link | English text | executable [/bin/perl ...]. (requires file(). This may be different from the type determined via server configuration files.

An open issue is handling of things like RCS or SCCS revision files. An intelligent piece of software could look up various revisions of a given file and provide status information on all these versions.

For programs, it would be nice to know what type of program it is (perl, tcl, sh, csh, C, etc). This can in some cases be inferred from the file, using the UNIX file() or other heuristics.

Note that how a server percieves and/or processes these resources is not defined in the above -- this is defined in the server software's configurational database. This is discussed in later sections.