Hello friends,

In the following output of ls -l in my home directory,
[san@Desktop ~]$ ls -la test1
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 san san 4096 Jun 14 00:01 .
drwx------ 25 san san 4096 Jun 13 21:13 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 san san 0 Jun 2 22:54 file2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 san san 0 Jun 14 00:01 .output
-rw-rw-r-- 1 san san 23 Jun 2 22:59 Text

What is the meaning of 25 (links) ? apart from itself, there are 24 directories that point to /home/san ? Please clarify me.

That number is the number of "hard links" to the file's inode. Every file has one hard link -- to its filename. A directory has at least two: one to the directory name and one to the file called "." inside the directory, so it can be accessed by either of these names. A directory with sub-directories will have an extra hard link to the ".." file in each of them.

The directory in your example must have 23 sub-directories in it. In general the number of hard links to a directory is 2n+2, where n is the number of subdirectories