[BBLISA] silly unix 'ls' question

[David Krikorian]

On 8/2/06, Jeff Ambrosino <jbambrosino at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

Same thing, as directories are just special files.

> e.g.:
>
> drwxrwxrwx   1 root  root    3813688 Aug  1 14:09 MyDirectory
>
> So what are the "1" and "3813688" numbers?

The '1' means that only 1 directory has that name, which is highly unusual.
You should have a minimum of '2', one for "MyDirectory" in the parent dir, and
one for "." in the "MyDirectory" dir.  Each of those two directories
(itself and its
parent) has a name that refers to that directory node.

The number will be higher if there are subdirectories of MyDirectory, as each
of those subdirs will also have a ".." entry referencing the node you know as
MyDirectory.

The other number is the number of bytes consumed by the directory file.  If you
add contents to MyDirectory, at some point it runs out of free bytes
to store the
names for those files, and needs to grow in size.