How Can i control the 'total' output in 'ls -l' command? the question is, how can control the `ls -l` `total` output ? first impression with example that give us `total = 0` els3@els3PC:~/test$ touch file els3@els3PC:~/test$ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 els3 els3 0 Jul 20 12:05 file As i mention this example give us this result `total = 0` by creating empty file. in other way I will try to create a non empty file2 contain '3ls3' . els3@els3PC:~/test$ cat > file2 3ls3 ^C els3@els3PC:~/test$ cat file2 3ls3 els3@els3PC:~/test$ ls -l total 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 els3 els3 5 Jul 20 12:11 file2 this second example give us `total 4` by creating a non empty file. the hole Q is how can i get for e.g `total 1` or `total 2` etc.. by creating a new file.

From `man ls`:


In addition, for each directory whose contents are displayed, the total number of
512-byte blocks used by the files in the directory is displayed on a line by
itself, immediately before the information for the files in the directory.


The minimum number of blocks allocated to a file depends on OS, file system type etc, so there is no direct way to influence the number shown.