Linux provides very useful options for viewing file attributes, such as owners and permissions, as well as file content.

There are many types of files on Linux systems and numerous ways to look at them, from listing permissions to viewing content. You just need to pick the right command to get the information you need. The command to use to get information about a file - especially file content - depends on the type of file that you're working with. This post describes the most basic commands, as well as some more complicated commands, that will give you information on files and file content.

Listing files on Linux with the ls -l command provides information on the file's owner and associated group. It also shows you what users can read, modify or execute the file as well as the size of the file (in bytes) and when the file was most recently updated. Here's an example:

The first column of the data above shows which of the read, write and execute permissions are provided to the file owner, the associated group and everyone else (at least every else who has access to the directory). The first character will tell you if what you're looking at is a regular file (-), a directory (d) or a symbolic link (l) -- a file that points to another file.