I am trying to learn coding in C in a Linux environment. Now the problem is that I have never used Linux before.

Now in my book it stated I needed to see if the file was actually stored in a certain location using the following command and parameters.
Now I looked this up using google and -ls seems to be the same to me as 'dir' in the Windows system and -l is the parameter deciding what information is shown.

What I do not understand is why I needed to write './' in front of the file name. I thought the -ls command lists only the files in the current directory and that './' has the same meaning (search in current directory).

Next to that, am I right in saying that by attaching the files name to '-ls -l' I make it only display the info for that particular file?

whilst it's just "ls" as a command, no - before it, you are right, there's no need to use ./ here. And yes, as per the documentation you have available to you already, putting a file name, or pattern, as a parameter, only matching files will be shown.

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Sorry for the '-' in front of the ls. Would the following command then result in the same or does the 'ls' command need to be send with it in every case?

You want

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ls is the command name. -l is just one of many options you can add to it to determine what information is displayed and how. In this case it stands for the "long" format. man ls will give you the documentation with the rest.

. (single dot) is just the relative path character for the current directory (just as .. means the containing directory), so ./filename is simply the relative path to the file, meaning of course "filename in this directory". Generally you do not need to use it with simple command arguments such as with ls, as the Present Working Directory is usually considered the default by most programs. So ls -l filename will work just fine. You only really need to add it when a full or relative path is expected, the most common case being launching scripts or executables when the current directory isn't in your PATH environment setting, or when the program you are feeding it to doesn't know to look in the PWD for some reason.

I recommend linuxcommand.org for a good primer on how to navigate around the shell.

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ls is a command analagous to the windows dir command
-l is an argument that makes the command more precise
In this case what you want is ls -l

There are many more arguments you can pass to the ls command

To learn about those, try the following
The same type of research will apply to any linux command: use man command or command --help

FWIW, my favorite ways to get directory listings that are sorted, displayed in columns, and detailed are

And one last tip: in linux every command and every filename is case-sensitive. If you aren't precise with case in commands and filenames, you will get unexpected results.

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