[somat]

Yeah but what do you do if your are not using shell?

Hint: it's stat(2) (or equivalent in your language library)

Additional hint: if using pythons os.stat set follow_symlinks to false. It recently took me an embarrassing long time to figure out why my script was failing to find symlinks.

[nunez]

but they were using a shell script in this blog though (and, yes, stat(2) is the way to go there)