Question

Just started to dabble in linux. Other than the date can someone tell me what each column is? Overview wise. I got to this point by cd /home ls =la

drwxr-xr-x  9 root         root         4096 Aug 27 22:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root         root         4096 Oct  3 14:48 ..
drwxr-xr-x  4 admispconfig admispconfig 4096 Dec  7  2010 admispconfig
drwxr-xr-x  2 jsmith       root         4096 Oct 15  2008 jsmith

If I were to guess the 3rd is the user, the 4th is the level of user, and the 6th is date/time created. But I’m not sure about the rest.

I will be going through a few beginning tutorials this weekend and if all goes well I’ll sign up for a intro class at the local college. So I’m testing the waters so to speak.

Answer 1

From man ls:

The Long Format

If the -l option is given, the following information is displayed for
each file: file mode, number of links, owner name, group name, number of
bytes in the file, abbreviated month, day-of-month file was last modified, hour file last modified, minute file last modified, and the pathname. In addition, for each directory whose contents are displayed, the
total number of 512-byte blocks used by the files in the directory is
displayed on a line by itself, immediately before the information for the
files in the directory. If the file or directory has extended
attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by
a ‘@’ character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended security information (such as an access control list), the permissions field
printed by the -l option is followed by a ‘+’ character.

If the modification time of the file is more than 6 months in the past or
future, then the year of the last modification is displayed in place of
the hour and minute fields.

If the owner or group names are not a known user or group name, or the -n
option is given, the numeric ID’s are displayed.

If the file is a character special or block special file, the major and
minor device numbers for the file are displayed in the size field. If
the file is a symbolic link, the pathname of the linked-to file is preceded by “->”.

I’m not going to quote the whole thing here. man ls is remarkably detailed about the meaning of the permissions column.