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I'm on an OS X operating System, and I don't understand what the second field in the ls -l command is supposed to mean. Say I am inside an empty directory, and I create a single directory inside of it:

mkdir folder

When I run ls -l I get:

$ ls -l total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 josh staff 68 Nov 17 15:45 folder

In this case the number of links to the directory is 2. I believe these links refer to the original directory name and the . entry inside the directory.

Now I add a file (not a folder) to the directory:

touch folder/file1

Now the output of ls -l looks like this:

$ ls -l total 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 josh staff 102 Nov 17 15:47 folder

Why is there now three links instead of two? For each new file I add, the number of links goes up by one. I see why this makes sense if I add a new subdirectory to the directory, as a new link (.. in the new folder) would be created, but not a new file. What are these extra numbers? Where do they come from?

1 Answer 1

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The link count is basically the number of places the file or directory is used. When it goes to zero, the file or directory is removed. Every file in a directory uses that directory, and a directory cannot be removed so long as there are files in it.

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