stat (GNU coreutils) 8.5

the format string length is counted in bytes and not in characters so that the presence of variable length characters causes misalignment

In the following example the character 'é' is 2 bytes long :

$ find . | while read P; do LANG=C stat --printf '%16F 0x%f\n' "$P"; done

directory 0x41ed

symbolic link 0xa1ff

regular file 0x81f6

$ find . | while read P; do LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8 stat --printf '%16F 0x%f\n' "$P"; done

répertoire 0x41ed

lien symbolique 0xa1ff

fichier 0x81f6