Where did all these files come from?

The -a option tells ls to list all files. In UNIX, files that begin with a decimal are often referred to as hidden files because they are not normally seen unless you use the -a option to view them. These files generally have special purposes, as we will see later.

Let's add one more option to see if that helps us learn whether we are looking at files or directories. We'll also try the "-l" option with the ls command.

$  ls -al

total 46
drwxr-xr-x   6 stu1     class       1024 Mar  6 14:31 .
drwxr-xr-x   7 root     sys         1024 Mar  6 14:24 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class       3284 Mar  6 14:31 .Xdefaults
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class        347 Mar  6 14:31 .dtfclass
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class        289 Mar  6 14:31 .dtinfo
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class        127 Mar  6 14:31 .dtprops
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class        506 Mar  6 14:31 .mailrc
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class       2260 Mar  6 14:31 .olinitrc
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class       4299 Mar  6 14:31 .olsetup
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class        692 Mar  6 14:31 .profile
-rw-------   1 stu1     class        142 Mar  6 14:31 .sh\_history
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class         64 Mar  6 14:31 .vtlrc
-rw-r--r--   1 stu1     class        531 Mar  6 14:31 .vtlrc.els
-rwxr-xr-x   1 stu1     class         57 Mar  6 14:31 .xsession
drwxr-xr-x   2 stu1     class         96 Mar  6 14:26 123
drwxr-xr-x   2 stu1     class         96 Mar  6 14:26 docs
drwxr-xr-x   2 stu1     class         96 Mar  6 14:26 empl
drwxr-xr-x   2 stu1     class         96 Mar  6 14:26 utils

$ _

This certainly gives us much more information. Your instructor can introduce some of this information now. Later, in the "File Management" section, this output will be covered in detail.