Metadata operations deal with the filesystem namespace, Inodes, and Stat data associated with Inodes.
Certain POSIX operations are related by the kind of operation they perform. The difference between these operations is the kind of object being operated on. For example, stat operates on a file, while lstat operates on a symlink rather than the symlink's target, and fstat operates on a file descriptor. In this document, such a related group of operations such as stat, fstat, and lstat is referred to as the `stat family'.