I am writing a c program to be run on UNIX, and attempting to utilize the chmod command. After consulting the man pages, i know that chmod needs two parameters. first is the permission bits, second is the file to be changed. I want to take the bitwise OR of the file's current permission bits and those entered by the user, and feed that to chmod() to change the file's permissions.
I found the access()
function, but am having trouble figuring out how to use it to get the permission bits of the specified file.
What i have right now is:
octalPermissionString = strtol(argv[1], (char**)NULL, 8);
if(chmod(argv[2], octalPermissionString | (access(argv[2], octalPermissionString)) < 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "Permissions of file %s were not changed.\n");
}
where:
argv[1] contains a string of a three digit decimal number entered by the user to be converted to octal and then be used as the permission bits to be bitwise OR'ed,
argv[2] is the the file to have it's permission changed, also specified by the user.
octalPermissionString is a long to hold the octal conversion of user input.
Is/Are there any other functions that can return the permission bits of a given file?
EDIT: missing close parenthesis