[BBLISA] silly unix 'ls' question

[Adam S. Moskowitz]

"Jeff Ambrosino" <jbambrosino at gmail.com> asked:
> when you run "ls -l" what do the two numerical columns represent for
> directory entries? I know they mean hardlinks and bytes for _files_,
> but what are they for directories?

Number of links and size. Seriously.

Directories are "just files," so the size is exactly that: How many
bytes are in the "directory file" itself.

The number of links is something like the number of files in the
directory excluding ".." -- or maybe it's the number of directories in
the directory. I can never remember exactly what this one represents.

AdamM