My Downloads folder looks utterly empty, not a single file or folder. And I have already emptied the Trash too. But for some reason, a Terminal ls run for this folder says there are 16 items! Here's the exact results on the Terminal:
Amits-MacBook:~ Amit$ ls -axhl ~/Downloads
total 16
drwx------+ 4 Amit staff 136B May 16 19:26 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 21 Amit staff 714B May 16 19:25 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 Amit staff 6.0K May 16 19:26 .DS_Store
-rw------- 1 Amit staff 0B May 6 15:18 .localized
Amits-MacBook:~ Amit$
And the Get Info window shows 1 item:
Please advise what's going on here and how I can get my Downloads folder to stop imagining things?
Best Answer
The ls manual page explains this:
Total, here, does not represent the number of items, but the sum of the number of BLOCKS allocated to the files in the directory.
For example, if the block size is 512 bytes (don't quote me on this, but the math checks out), and the total disk space used by the directory is 8KB on disk:
My empty Downloads directory reads the same: