LIST FILE DETAILS LINUX HOW TO

The number 1 after the permission characters is the number of hard links to this file. In our example, rw-r-r- means that the user can read and write the file, and the group and others can only read the file. The permission character can take the following value: You can change the file permissions with the chmodĬommand. The first three characters are for the user, the next three are for the group, and the last three are for others.

The next nine characters are showing the file permissions. Values for other file types are as follows: In this example, the first character is -, which indicates a regular file. Let’s explain the most important columns of the output. Here is an example: ls -l /etc/hosts -rw-r-r- 1 root root 337 Oct 4 11:31 /etc/hosts When the long listing format is used, you can see the following file information: The -l ( lowercase L) option tells ls to print files in a long listing format. The default output of the ls command shows only the names of the files and directories, which is not very informative. In the sections below, we will explore the most commonly used options.

If the user you are logged in with doesn’t have read permissions to the directory, you will get a message saying that ls can’t open the directory: ls /root ls: cannot open directory '/root': Permission denied You can also pass multiple directories and files separated by space: ls /etc /var /etc/passwd For example, to list the contents of the /etc directory, you would type: ls /etc

To list files in a specific directory, pass the directory path as an argument to the ls command. The files are listed in alphabetical order in as many columns as can fit across your terminal: cache db empty games lib local lock log mail opt run spool tmp Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directoryĭevice: 801h/2049d Inode: 276944 Links: 16Īccess: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 33/www-data) Gid: (33/www-data)Īs you can see from the output of state the inode value returned is the same as the one from the ls command: 276944.When used with no options and arguments, ls displays a list of the names of all files in the current working directory The example will stat the html directory seen above. This method is generally used against a single file, while the ls command is used against a list of files. the wordpress directory was assigned inode 405570Īnother method of viewing a file’s inode is to use the stat command.the html directory was assigned inode 276944.The first column of the returned listing is the assigned inode. In the example above two directories are returned by the ls command. When used with the -i flag the results for each file contains the file’s inode number. The simplist method of viewing the assigned inode of files on a Linux filesystem is to use the ls command. The ls command is useful for discovering the inode number for a list of files in a directory, while the state command is better suited for single files or directories. There are two commands that can be used to view a file or directory’s inode, and they are ls and stat.

LIST FILE DETAILS LINUX HOW TO

In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to view the inode number assigned to a file or directory. These unique IDs are used by the filesystem’s database in order to keep track of files. Files written to Linux filesystems are assigned an inode.

List file details linux