ls command help, figures not matching up

Hello all.

I ran my AV app. and it scanned 600k+ files on my osx tiger powerpc laptop.
I went into terminal and ran ls -l */* on my applications folder.

for one entry it returned:

Snood3.0/:
total 17376
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ds admin 5152 Jan 17 2006 License30.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ds admin 226101 Jan 17 2006 Snood
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ds admin 15053 Jan 17 2006 Snood 3.0 ReadMe (text).txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ds admin 18429 Jan 17 2006 Snood 3.0 ReadMe.rtf
-rw-r--r-- 1 ds admin 352 Jan 18 2006 serial.rtf

I ran ls -l on its parent folder and got this result
drwxrwxrwx 8 ds admin 272 Jan 18 2006 Snood3.0
it shows 8 for the directories. There are 5 files + . & .. = 7 not 8?

1. What constitutes the "8" number if the total "directories" add up to 7?
2. What does the figure "total x" represent, in this case total 17376?
3. As stated above my computer has over 600k files. I'd like to identify which folders/apps contain the most files so I can trim this figure down. Is there a command to list all files of such folder? If in fact the above example includes 17k+ files and I only see 5 I'd like to be able discern the discrepancy between the two.

Thanks for any help

There are two possibilities I can think of offhand.

1. The filesystem for those has problems. see man fsck (or whatever utility anlyzes filesystems for you). Try this first.

2. Since ls returns something different from another "non-standard" utility and ls returns fewer files, consider that your system may have a rootkit installed. This behavior -underreporting files - is a common symptom of that. ls, quota, find, and other binaries - sometimes even kernel modules in Linux - are compromised so as to not show files. Or report the disk space they use.

I'm making guesses here - there is no way to know.

What OS do you have?

It's a Mac (OS X).

Running ls -l and running ls -l */* are 2 different things.
Where did you get the 8? From drwxrwxrwx 8 ? That's not the number of files in the directory.