How to get chmod (octal) permissions of the folder in the terminal?

What am i to type in terminal to know the chmod of the folder i want?

stat -c %a FILE_OR_FOLDER_PATH

e.g. stat -c %a /etc shows 755

GNU find

Makes use of %m format for -printf flag.

$ find /etc/ -maxdepth 0 -printf "%m\n"                                                                                                                                                 
755

or

$ find /etc/ -prune -printf "%m\n"                                                                                                                                                      
755

Python

$ python -c 'import os,sys;print(oct(os.stat(sys.argv[1]).st_mode))' /etc                                                                                                               
040755

Or if we want to only get the owner-group-other permission bits only:

$ python -c 'import os,sys;print(oct(os.stat(sys.argv[1]).st_mode)[-3:])' /etc                                                                                                          
755

Perl

Via File::stat, pretty much same as in the documentation:

$ perl -le 'use File::stat; $fs=stat($ARGV[0]);printf "%o\t%s\n",$fs->mode & 07777,$ARGV[0]' /etc                                                                                       
755 /etc

stat FILE_OR_FOLDER_PATH

this is quicker but displays the whole lot