root@ubuntu:/etc/openvpn# ls -l test.conf -rw-r--r-- l root root 791 Mar 20 09:23 test.conf
What does the above command mean?
root@ubuntu:/etc/openvpn# ls -l test.conf -rw-r--r-- l root root 791 Mar 20 09:23 test.conf
What does the above command mean?
That is not a command. It contains a command.
It's a prompt, followed by a command, followed by the output of the command. The command itself is:
ls -l test.conf
That command displays information about the file called test.conf
located in the current directory. The ls
command displays (or lists) information about files. The -l
flag makes it display the information in long form, rather than just showing the filename.
(ls
without a flag like -l
is most often used to list multiple files or determine if a file exists, but may be used with a file known to exist; by default in Ubuntu, issuing ls filename
will highlight filename
in a way that shows what kind of file it is, for example, it will use a certain color if it is a directory, another if it is marked executable.)
The output is:
-rw-r--r-- l root root 791 Mar 20 09:23 test.conf
That means the file:
-rw-r--r--
doesn't start with d
)s
in -rw-r--r--
) and non-sticky (no t
)rw-
for owner) but only readable by other users (r--
for group members, r--
again for others) — see the community documentation on permissionsroot
(with root
as its group identity also)test.conf
The beginning of the line is a prompt; this is what is displayed to the user in a shell to notify the user they may enter a command. Prompts are often configured to provide helpful information to the user. Here the prompt is:
root@ubuntu:/etc/openvpn#
This means the current user is root
, the machine's hostname is ubuntu
(which usually means this is a live CD/DVD/USB system, but someone could name their machine ubuntu
in an installed system too), and the current directory is /etc/openvpn
(which is where configuration data for OpenVPN are stored, see also the Ubuntu OpenVPN documentation).
The #
character indicates that this is a superuser shell (which is to be expected as it is owned by root, the superuser); otherwise it would have been $
(but please note that this convention is not universally followed, and some shells default to %
which does not indicate anything about the shell's capabilities).
I think that you have a misunderstanding with the structure of that line.
The first sentence is telling the user at a determined computer that is in the mentioned folder:
root@ubuntu:/etc/openvpn#
Here you have:
and the corresponding separators between them are @
, :
and #
The command, that is after the last separator (#
), is:
ls -l test.conf
The output that you get is:
-rw-r--r-- l root root 791 Mar 20 09:23 test.conf