While performing server maintenance I often found myself going directory by directory adjusting permissions on a file by file basis. I found myself wishing that I had something akin to WinDirStat or QDirStat. There was no such thing on the market, and so I got to planning. Though I originally wanted something more graphical, I realised that I would often be working out of my hypervisor and on servers without GUIs. Thus I decided to work more towards a system like ncdu.
The end goal is to have a NCDU like interface with colored text that can display at a glance the permissions of each file and directory. There are many options for extras to increase productivity such as filters and searching; however the primary focus at this point in development is functionality and end-user QOL.
You must have NCurses library installed to be able to use permstat.
If you choose to build permstat from source your compiler will also need to have the -lncurses flag
The scanning method relies on Boost::Filesystem. Boost filesystem needs to be precompiled into a binary with Boost Build before it can be used in compilation of permstat. Please follow Boost Getting Started to learn how to compile the filesystem binary.