FAQ: Manipulation - ls -a

This community-built FAQ covers the “ls -a” exercise from the lesson “Manipulation”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Web Development

Learn the Command Line

FAQs on the exercise ls -a

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What do the “.” and “. .” mean in the returned information from “ls -a”?


$ ls
action  comedy  drama  genres.txt
$ ls -a
. ..  .preferences  action  comedy  drama  genres.txt
$
1 Like

They are directories. The single dot is the current directory, the double dot is the parent directory. The single dot prefixing the file name, preferences refers to a hidden file.

6 Likes

I can’t understand what it current directory and parent directory. For example what are those directories for “comedy” directory? If a ls -a shows both(parent and current) links for each file, how can genres.txt or hidden .prefferences have only one link each?

$ pwd
/home/ccuser/workspace/movies
$ ls
action  comedy  drama  genres.txt
$ ls -a
. ..  .preferences  action  comedy  drama  genres.txt
$

PWD is Present Working Directory… movies is the parent directory (the one that DOT refers to).

action comedy drama are all directories. .preferences is a hidden file in the current directory. genres.txt is a text file in the current directory.

Thank you, now it’s clear! The course encourage (or even provokes) to go faster but then…:slight_smile:

1 Like