If it is a dash - then that means it is a normal file. That's the two important ones. There are several other things it could be, but for simplicity's sake, we don't need to concern ourselves with that. After that there are three groups of three characters. These groups indicate the permissions of the file or directory.
Permissions determine who can read from the file or write to the file.
Fairly simply, the r means read permission, the w means write permission, and the x means execute permission. If there is a dash - then that means that permission is not granted. The second group of permission bits corresponds to the group's permissions. Each file or directory belongs to a group. Most users of our service are in the group users .