The first name is the owner of the file and the second name indicates group ownership. By default Red Hat Linux creates a group that matches your login name and everything you create is stamped with both. This is a security measure that we'll discuss in a future column. To read this information you need to mentally split it into four fields. The first part, '-', simply informs us that this is a file not a directory.
Directories begin with 'd'.
The second field represents the owner's rights. A shell script file would have 'rwx' for the owner because it's an executable. We'll spend some time on setting permissions in an upcoming lesson, but if you want to jump ahead, what we've covered in this column are fundamental Unix commands. You can read ahead in any Linux or Unix book. Then we'll return to the fundamentals and learn more about using and administering the system.