Re: ls -l --no-total

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   I've seen other programs printing only informative messages to
   stderr.

Depends on what you call a "informative message", a warning should go
to stderr.  Normal output should go to stdout.  `total NNNN' is normal
output, hence it should go to stdout.

   I know this behavior is standardized but IIRC I've already read
   about (old) implementations that printed the `total' to stderr.

And those implementations where broken.