OK! I understand that field 1 shows the permissions et al, and that field 2 (the field full of 1's & 2's - below) the hard links. In the example below, the file 'test' is hard linked to the file 'tets'. The 2 shows that 2 files are hard linked and pointing to the same inode.

-rwxr--r-- 2 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 133 Oct 27 12:42 test*
-rw-r--r-- 1 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 66 Oct 1 22:00 test2
-rw-r--r-- 1 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 83 Oct 1 20:57 test2.sh
-rwxr--r-- 1 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 191 Sep 29 21:56 test.sh*
-rwxr--r-- 2 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 133 Oct 27 12:42 tets*

But, you cannot hard link directories! So what does field 2 represent in the example below?

drwx------ 3 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 4.0K Sep 18 21:32 .adobe/
drwxr-xr-x 2 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 4.0K Nov 2 15:57 Bash/
drwx------ 14 dmk-antiX users 4.0K Nov 7 09:44 .cache/
drwx------ 8 dmk-antiX dmk-antiX 4.0K Sep 19 22:05 .claws-mail/
drwxr-xr-x 22 dmk-antiX users 4.0K Nov 5 10:15 .config/

Anyone wanting more (and better) info might do well to look at one of these:

http://linuxcommando.blogspot.co.uk/...ard-links.html

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...-in-unix-linux

Thanks for any help

dmk

Hi, that's because each directory contains a '.' directory which is a hardlink to itself. Also, if you create a directory inside it, ls -l will show 3 hardlinks, because the new directory contains '..' which is a hardlink to its parent directory.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks miligates - I can't pretend to follow this entirely but I get the gist. I can now stop worrying about it!

dmk

ps. I've added your info to my notes and tagged it ln & ls.