Determine if the current user has write permission in a directory

Question

I know you can determine the owner of directory by doing:

ls -ld ~/foo | awk '{ print $3 }'

You could then compare it to the current user by doing this:

if [[ $(ls -ld ~/foo | awk '{ print $3 }') == "$USER" ]] # or $(id -u -n ) instead of $USER
then
    echo "You are the owner"
else
    echo "You are NOT the owner"
fi

But you can have permissions to write without being the owner. How do you determine this?

Answer 1

I suppose

if [ -w ~/foo ]; then ....

should do what you want.

Also, stat -c %U ~/foo is a better way to obtain the owner than parsing ls output.