What does lrwxrwxrwx (l...) stand for?

Question

I hope you doing good. Linux Directories contain some system files usually it's hard to detect if Linux doesn't have color-coding enabled or no extension/suffix with the file. We use ls -l, ls -lah command to see the file type and other properties. Output can be as shown below

ls
-rwxrwxrwx Its a file (-)
drwxrwxrwx Its a directory (d)
lrwxrwxrwx What dose (l) stands for?
I wanted to know all kind of files we can have inside Linux (on basis of -, d, l if more) and the list of characters we use to identify them.

Example
- stands for files
d stands for directory
l stands for what???

Answer 1

l stands for a symbolic link. It is an alias/another name to a file or directory else where.

For example, let say I have a file myfile.txt I can create a symbolic link to it and use it as a shortcut.

$ ln -s myfile.txt another_name_of_myfile.txt
$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kygoh kygoh 10 Dec 19 21:39 another_name_of_myfile.txt -> myfile.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kygoh kygoh  0 Dec 19 21:38 myfile.txt

Notice that myfile.txt is a file and another_name_of_myfile.txt is a symbolic link to this file.

More reference you can see man ln. I also found a website on this topic: https://linuxhandbook.com/symbolic-link-linux/

Answer 2

-l stands for a symbolic link. You can see what all letters represent in coreutils manual or info ls in your terminal:

‘-’
regular file 

‘b’
block special file 

‘c’
character special file 

‘C’
high performance (“contiguous data”) file 

‘d’
directory 

‘D’
door (Solaris 2.5 and up) 

‘l’
symbolic link 

‘M’
off-line (“migrated”) file (Cray DMF) 

‘n’
network special file (HP-UX) 

‘p’
FIFO (named pipe) 

‘P’
port (Solaris 10 and up) 

‘s’
socket 

‘?’
some other file type 

Answer 3

l means it is a symbolic link, ls should also show you where the link is pointing to:

$ ls -l link_to_a
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 vtrefny vtrefny  1 19. pro 14.39 link_to_a -> a

Other possible file types are:

• - -- file
• d -- directory
• c -- character device
• b -- block device
• p -- pipe
• l -- symbolic link