What is that “total” in the very first line after ls -l? [closed]

Answer 1

You can find the definition of that line in the ls documentation for your platform. For coreutils ls (the one found on a lot of Linux systems), the information can be found via info coreutils ls:

For each directory that is listed, preface the files with a line `total BLOCKS', where BLOCKS is the total disk allocation for all files in that directory.