I suspect that what you saw was an alias to the "ls" command such that folders and other special files are given symbols after their name to represent what they are.
My favourite way of doing this is is to use "ls -FC" as your ls command, which will give output such as:
Desktop/ Music/ Sites/
Documents/ Network Trash Folder/ TheVolumeSettingsFolder/
And so on.
Check the manual page on "ls" (type "man ls" in a Terminal session) for other options that may be of interest.
You can add this to your default setup by editing your .cshrc in your home directory and adding a line such as:
alias ls ls -FC
Good luck!