Howto: Understand Output From ls

When you type in ls -la, you might get something like this:

~/stuff fergie$ ls -l
total 6584
-rw-r--r--    1 fergie  fergie  1252146 Jan 28 19:51 009.jpg
-rw-r--r--    1 fergie  fergie  1251616 Jan 28 19:50 Adam.jpg
-rw-r--r--    1 fergie  fergie    13587 Jan 30 20:04 BUN103-DXHZ.pdf
-rw-r--r--    1 fergie  fergie   141821 Apr 17 09:53 Ryanair_flight_19_04_2007.pdf
-rw-r--r--    1 fergie  wheel    114710 Feb 14 20:12 glasgow.pdf
drwxr-xr-x   73 fergie  fergie     2482 Jan 28 19:40 linnea_jan_07
-rw-r--r--    1 fergie  fergie   583168 Jan 25 21:29 presentation.pps

So what does all that stuff actually mean? Well the format of ls -l output is as follows: file mode, number of links, owner name, group name, item size (in bytes by default), month of last modification, day of last modification, time of last modification, name. So for example the first entry can be interpreted as follows.

file mode:	-rw-r--r--
number of links:	1
owner name:	fergie
group name:	fergie
item size:	1252146 bytes
month of last modification	January
day of last modification	28th
time of last modification	19:51
name:	009.jpg