Possible Duplicate:ls command: what does the first line mean? I have an empty directory.I am using following command to view the contents of that directory.ls -lartThe output I get is below.total 12drwxr-xr-x 5 root  root  4096 Oct  2 12:26 ..drwxr-xr-x 2 apx   aim   4096 Nov 29 18:40 .I don't have any files in this directory,then what counts out to 12 here ( total 12 ) ? 
what is total in the output of ls command
ls
That is the total number of blocks taken up by the files, although I would expect the total to be 8 instead of 12 (using 1k blocks).  Try ls -as1 to see the size in blocks of each file.