What's the easiest way to remove the “total <size>” line from the output of ls -l?

Question

The best I could find via Google/man ls was:

ls -l | grep -v '^total'

Is there something I'm missing in the flags to ls?

Also, why is the total size in kb, regardless of the -h flag? scratch that, seems like it does, not sure what I was seeing then.

Answer 1

Looking in the source code of coreutils, I found out that total will always be displayed when using the -l option on directories.

Using the -d option to list entries instead of directory contents hides total. But if you run that without arguments (or on a directory), it'll just show the directory and not its contents. Therefore, you need wildcards. * matches all files and .* matches hidden files as well (which corresponds with the -a option):

ls -ld * .*

As for the -h option, it works for me. 1118360 bytes show up as 1.1M. Files smaller than 1024 show up in bytes.