Total in `ls -l`

Question

When I run ls -l, the following is displayed:

>: ls -l
total 320
-rw-r--r--   1 foo  staff    633  5 Apr 13:23 A.class
-rw-r--r--   1 foo  staff    296  5 Apr 13:24 A.java
...

What does the total signify? Size? If so, what size?

Answer 1

From man 1 ls on Mac OS X 10.6.7, specifically the section titled "The Long Format"

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.

Answer 2

It's the total number of blocks (usually 512 bytes per POSIX; see man ls for details of the $BLOCKSIZE environment variable) as obtained from the st_blocks and st_blocksize elements of the stat() structure for each file. As such, it is not recursive and not bloated by "sparse" files.