Determining the owner of a folder

[Mac Dude]

I'm fairly ignorant about Unix (though learning), so I'm unable to 
figure out how to tell if the current rev user has permission to open a 
folder.  If I understand correctly, I can get the permissions via "the 
long folders", and from that I can see that, for instance, a folder 
with 777 permissions can be opened by anyone, and one with 700 
permissions can only be opened by the owner (correct?), but how can I 
tell if the current user is indeed the owner?

The only thing that comes to mind sounds sloppy, retrieve the 
specialFolderPath("desktop") and grab the userName from the returned 
path, then check any generated path to see if it is in the USERS folder 
and then if it is in the username's home folder or not.  However, I 
don't think that would cover everything.  Is there a nice clean method?

This is under Mac OS X using revolution 2.1