Todd C. Miller:

> > accommodate ls -l implementations that print "total 0" in an empty directory
> >
> > Both FreeBSD and GNU ls(1) behave that way.
> 
> This is arguably a bug in OpenBSD's ls.  It certainly differs
> from historical behavior.

As far as I can tell from the repository histories, OpenBSD has
inherited the 4.4BSD behavior.  FreeBSD explicitly changed this
16 years ago in r130236, r130237:

  If we are asked to print the total number of blocks, do so even if we
  have no entries to print (either due to an empty directory or an
  error).  This makes the -l and -s options more consistent, like
  Solaris and (Debian) Linux.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de