What are the different columns in this Terminal display

terminal

I am wondering what the different columns are in this attached screenshot of the Terminal window. The command line that I typed into Terminal is:

ls -l ~/Desktop

It is the command for the computer to bring up all of the files that are located on the Desktop. There is another column to the right with the file names. I left that out of the screenshot for privacy purposes.

enter image description here

Best Answer

From left to right, the columns are: permissions (e.g., read, write, execute), then the number of links, the owning user of the file, the owning group of the file, the file size (bytes for files, 512 byte blocks for directories), and the last time the file was accessed. The column you didn't show on the far right is the name of the file in question.

For future reference, you can always run man <command> to find information about a command. So in this case, man ls will provide the information you're looking for.

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