Hi Guys,

I am trying to understand the meaning of the output of ls -ln.
I did look on the internet and as well on man ls without any success. I am posting the output and I would appreciate if someone more knowledgeable than me could explain the numbers. If you guys have a web site I can go to for explanations, that would be great as well.

drwxr-xr-x 4 1000 1000 4096 2009-03-06 11:23 Desktop

Cheers

The first bit are the permissions (rwx-=read,write,execute,none). I'm not sure about the second number. The third and forth refer to the owner and the group rights to use the file. The file size comes next. After that is date of creation or last modification whichever is more recent. The time of that last modification and finally the name of the file/folder.
That should get you started.
cheers,
jdk

All the n option does is replace the user and group names with the numeric values represented by those names.

Compare the ls -ln output to the ls -l output to see the difference. (On many distributions, users are numbered starting from 1000, and any users in the 1 through 999 range are assumed to be "system" users. User 0 is always "root.") By default, the "primary" group for a user is a private group with the same number and name as the user.

The 4 is the number of hard links to that directory and the 4096 is the number of bytes used by the directory. (Actually, 4096 is probably the minimum block size used by your file system, so you'll only see 0, 4096, 8192, ..., as directory sizes.)

I will assume you understand the date and time numbers . . .

Thank you so much Guys.

here is a listing
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/cmd.csp?path=l/ls
or have you read