mo...@rodents-montreal.org (Mouse) writes: >For what it's worth, it appears this behaviour is very longstanding. I >find that 1.4T and 5.2 behave identically in this respect and are >consistent with the "programmatic consumption versus human consumption" >interpretation.
The change seems to be much older. When multi-column output was introduced, it would print the total line when -s or -l were given. With 4.3BSD-Reno there was a new ls implementation with separate output routines for single, columnar and long output that only printed the total line for the last two modes.
