ls
is used to list files (note the first letter is the letter L not the number 1!)
Let's try it from our home directory:
Notice that second command and its output?
ls -a
shows all the files in a directory, including hidden ones. Why are there hidden files? Because in the Unix world, all directories contain two special sub-directories:
.
points to the current directory - /home/pi
is the same as /home/pi/.
..
points to the parent directory, the one that holds the current directory - /home/pi/..
is really just /home/
ls
normally hides everything starting with a dot, because these don't really convey any extra information to a user.
To complicate matters even further, it's traditional for special configuration files to be stored in ~
and named like .something
so that they won't show up in a directory listing by default.
Want to see more detail about individual files?
The -l
option, for a long listing, will give you several columns of useful data. For the file called .bashrc
, you have:
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi pi 3243 Sep 8 20:23 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--
is a shorthand for the file's type and mode or permissions. In this case, the file is a plain old file (not a directory or other special file) and:
- readable and writeable by its owner
- readable by its group
- readable by everyone
The rest of the line, in order:
-
1
is the number of hard links to the file -
pi
, repeated twice, tells you the owner and group of the file -
3243
is the number of bytes taken up by the file -
Sep 8 20:23
is the file's modification time
You don't need to worry too much about this stuff yet - just remember that -l
gives you more detail.
Page last edited January 03, 2015
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