Please shed some light on that erratic, second column of ls -l, that numeric column between the 1st one - the permission string - and the third one - the user ownership.
I just can't pin it down, what it means and predict or explain it for any sub-directory with known content.
I know what a hard link is, and what not.
I know that when you create a new file anewfile, it has 1 hard link. When you use ln anewfile samestuffdifferentname, the directory containing the aforementioned now contains both files and both have a hard link number of 2, meaning that there is 1 specific content on the storage - with 2 names, not just 1.
So, things in ls -l are clear to me for all listings of regular files, but as soon as a sub-directory is listed, things become erratic, unpredictable, unexpected for me.
I've looked for the specific meaning in --help, man and info, in vein; most video tutorials just cover the meaning of that line superficially, if at all; same with web search results.
I've hacked around with cd, ls and find, filtering files by permission string with or without executable, but I just can't pin it down.
For example:
~/Pictures/
According to ls -l this sub-directory of my home directory has a hard link number of 4 - but I've certainly never created any hard link of that file/directory.
So, maybe 4 is constituted by the sub-directories content: Maybe 4 regular files, each containing just 1 hard link, and so a hard link number of 1? Or 3 regular files like that, but additionally that sub-directory also counts as 1, so, the sum of the sub-directory and its content constitutes the 4? Wrong! It contains 22 files: 2 sub-directories and 20 regular files - 18/20 are files with a file extension (image file extension) or .xcf.
Please, let's get to the bottom of that column - once and for all.
