Every file and directory has two owners:

• An owner: one account.
• A group: one group.

ls -l shows them in columns 3 and 4. In "List a Directory with ls", these columns were for later. Now you can read them:

learner@tidepool:~$ ls -l /srv/shop/rota.txt
-rw-r----- 1 ana staff 220 Oct 11 09:15 /srv/shop/rota.txt

The next chapter explains the permissions, the nine characters after the type.

New files

When you make a file, its owner is your account, and its group is your primary group:

learner@tidepool:~$ touch notes.txt
learner@tidepool:~$ ls -l notes.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 learner learner 0 Oct 12 09:14 notes.txt

stat: only what you ask for

stat -c writes the details that you choose:

learner@tidepool:~$ stat -c '%U %G %n' /srv/shop/rota.txt
ana staff /srv/shop/rota.txt