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I'd like to ask some help with a question about "ls" program: could please anyone explain what does the second field of "ls -l" output mean?

Here is an example:

sergey@home-ubuntu:~$ ls -l
total 64
drwxr-xr-x  8 sergey sergey  4096 мая 12 11:54 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x  5 sergey sergey  4096 апр 28 00:09 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 10 sergey sergey 12288 мая 12 23:22 Downloads
drwxrwxr-x  3 sergey sergey  4096 апр 12 15:22 Games
drwxrwxr-x  7 sergey sergey  4096 апр  2 23:02 MEGAsync
drwxr-xr-x  3 sergey sergey  4096 апр 15 21:18 Music
drwxr-xr-x  4 sergey sergey  4096 мая  7 09:10 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x  2 sergey sergey  4096 апр  2 22:24 Public
drwxrwxr-x  4 sergey sergey  4096 апр  9 17:57 Scripts
drwxr-xr-x  5 sergey sergey  4096 апр 16 22:42 snap
drwxrwxr-x  3 sergey sergey  4096 мая  9 21:20 Soft
drwxr-xr-x  2 sergey sergey  4096 апр  2 22:24 Templates
drwxrwxr-x  3 sergey sergey  4096 мая 12 23:39 Tests
drwxr-xr-x  3 sergey sergey  4096 мая 12 16:11 Videos
            ^
         this field i'm interested in

The internet says it shows the number of links to a file, wikipedia specifies to hard links, but i couldn't find any information about directories, yet it's represented in ls -l output.

Since one can't create a hard link to a folder, it's unclear what that field means.

runout
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    Does https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/43046/what-is-the-number-between-file-permission-and-owner-in-ls-l-command-output help? ("the number of contained directory entries, when referring to a directory.") – Jeff Schaller May 12 '20 at 18:53
  • @JeffSchaller, i'm a little too late with my answer, but yes, your link does help. Thank you! – runout Nov 20 '23 at 05:41

1 Answers1

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From info ls:

‘-l’
‘--format=long’
‘--format=verbose’
In addition to the name of each file, print the file type, file mode bits, number of hard links, owner name, group name, size, and timestamp (*note Formatting file timestamps::), normally the modification timestamp (the mtime, *note File timestamps::). Print question marks for information that cannot be determined.

So, yes, that is the number of hard links.But what does it mean?

Simple: quite similar to the number of files in the directory.

At the start, when a directory is created, it starts with two hard links (think of that as the hard links for . and ..)

$ mkdir anewone
$ ls -lad anewone
drwxr-xr-x 2 isaac isaac 4096 May 12 18:29 anewone
...........^^..... 2 hard links.

As you create new sub-directories in that directory, the number of hard links increase:

$ touch anewone/{a..e}
$ ls -lad anewone
drwxr-xr-x 2 isaac isaac 4096 May 12 18:30 anewone
...........^^..... No change for files.

$ mkdir anewone/{f..m}
$ ls -lad anewone
drwxr-xr-x 10 isaac isaac 4096 May 12 18:30 anewone
...........^^..... 8 new directories ==> 10 hard links.

Related:

Why does a new directory have a hard link count of 2 before anything is added to it?

hardlink count for directory