Owner of a directory

[Tech Rams]

hi
    I am looking for a way to know the owner of a directory/file. There is the obvious way of parsing the output of ls, but did not find much beyond that. 
    Is there a better way (that works inside of a shell script)?

thanks,
Rams

 		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Next-gen email? Have it all with the  all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta.