"ls -al" question

[Tipem]

Hi,

When I run an ls -al command on a directory, obviously, it lists the file. However, preceding the list is a line that says "total 29384734" with some random number. What statistic does this number represent? Total directory file size? Number of files in the directory?

Thanks in advanced.

Ian

[matey]

I think so, this includes the hidden/system files and the files inside the directories/sub-directories as well.

(because it does not add up to the size of the files).
you can get an idea by doing ls -alR
or use find command like find /root/
or find /home/$USER/