This command provides several operations on a file's name or attributes.
Option indicates what to do with the file name.
Any unique abbreviation for option is acceptable. If the file doesn't exist or its access time cannot be queried then an error is generated. If there is no dot in name then returns the empty string. This means that if name refers to a symbolic link the information returned in varName is for the link rather than the file it refers to. On systems that don't support symbolic links this option behaves exactly the same as the stat option.