How to interpret the number after permission in ls -l?

Question

I am wondering what the number 1234 means in this example:

rw-rw-rw- 1234 blabla blabla 3243253235 14:40 myfile.zip

Answer 1

From man ls

If the -l option is given, the following information is displayed for each file: file mode, number of links, owner name, group name, number of bytes in the file, abbreviated month, day-of-month file was last modi- fied, hour file last modified, minute file last modified, and the path- name. In addition, for each directory whose contents are displayed, the total number of 512-byte blocks used by the files in the directory is displayed on a line by itself, immediately before the information for the files in the directory. If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended security information (such as an access control list), the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '+' character.

In short, it is the number of links to that file.

Answer 2

That means the links to that file or directory's inode. Hard links I mean, not soft links:

[root@biggiesmalls agsantovena]# touch test
[root@biggiesmalls agsantovena]# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 12 10:50 test
[root@biggiesmalls agsantovena]# ln test test2
[root@biggiesmalls agsantovena]# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 0 Jun 12 10:50 test
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 0 Jun 12 10:50 test2

Answer 3

The "number of links" to a file or directory is basically the number of names it has (and the names do not have to exist in the same directory, but they do have to exist on the same filesystem — hard links cannot cross filesystem boundaries).

Note that a directory with subdirectories will have a link for each occurrence of the name .. in each subdirectory, since the .. directory is nothing but a hard link to the parent directory.