state and file perms confusion

neilwatson has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings Sisters and Brothers, Using stat, I'm not getting the results I expect. Could you please explain why.

($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
         $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)
                    = stat($file);

... Later

$mode = $mode & 07777;
print "mode=".$mode."\n";
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In this example the target file is /etc/passwd. Here are my results.

$ ls -l /etc/passwd
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1289 Jul 22 16:27 /etc/passwd
$ ./perms-module.pl /etc/passwd 644 root root
mode=420
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Why is the mode 420 rather than 644?

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

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