ls
ls is another basic command in unix. just type it and you will get the list of all the files, directories in your current directory (pwd) :> ls myDetails.txt websites.txt newDirectory But which of these are files? which are directories? here names suggest which is a file and which is a folder. But what if its more difficult to understand? simple... use the ls -lrt command. :> ls -lrt total 150000 drwxr-xr-x myself someusr 50000 Nov 1 2010 newDirectory -rw-r--r-- myself someusr 50000 Dec 10 2011 websites.txt -rwxr--r-- some1 someusr 50000 May 4 2012 myDetails.txt The first line tells us the total size of the current directory then as you can see, there are 6 columns that follow. The first column tell you whether it is a directory or a file and what permissions it has (read chmod later) The second column tells you about the user who has created the file/directory. The 4th column tells us the size of the file/directory. (in bytes) The next one tells on which date