What does 'total' in the long listing(ls -l) refer to ?
 

Hi,

Could you please let me know What does 'total' in the long listing(ls -l) refer to ?

Thanks,
Sagar

The sum of the file sizes in the listing.

It is the total disk space taken up by the files in the directory. This includes the size of sub-directories (but not their contents - the directory itself uses some space to record the names of it's contents and file meta data).

Note that the total space used is rounded up because each file takes an integer number of blocks on the device - once a block is used by a file, the whole block is un-available for other files, even if the amount of space used within the block is very small.

A typical block size is 4k, so the total amount will usually be some multiple of 4.

Thanks Much Matthew....