what does the First character (number) mean in ls -l on OSX Snow Leopard?

Question

I've included an abreviated sample of ls -lasF output from OSX 10.6.7 - the man page for ls does not discuss the first number (0,8,16,32,48,80,376) per line that is shown in this output. (/etc links to this directory on OSX)

mimac:~ frank$ ls -lasF /private/etc
total 1000
   0 drwxr-xr-x  22 root   wheel    4216 May 20 13:41 ./
   0 drwxr-xr-x@  6 root   wheel     204 Dec 15  2009 ../
   8 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel      85 Apr 11 23:59 .BroadbandTuner-saved-settings
   0 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel     753 Jul 16  2009 6to4.conf
   8 -rw-------   1 root   wheel      24 Apr 14 04:08 AFP.conf
   0 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel       0 Dec 15  2009 RemoteManagement.launchd
   0 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel     515 Jun 25  2009 afpovertcp.cfg
   8 lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel      15 Dec 15  2009 aliases@ -> postfix/aliases
   0 -rw-r-----   1 root   wheel   16384 May 18  2009 aliases.db
  32 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel   31925 May 18  2009 amavisd.conf
...
 80 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel   40188 May 20 13:41 authorization
 56 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel   24697 Dec 11  2009 authorization~previous
…
 16 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel  125811 May 18  2009 moduli
...
 48 -r--r--r--   1 root   wheel   69060 Mar  9 00:49 php.ini.default
 80 -r--r--r--   1 root   wheel   38780 Sep 17  2008 php.ini.default-5.2-previous
...
376 -rw-r--r--   1 root   wheel  677959 Jun 25  2009 services

Answer 1

Directly from the man page:

-s Display the number of file system blocks actually used by each file, in units of 512 bytes, where partial units are rounded up to the next integer value. If the output is to a terminal, a total sum for all the file sizes is output on a line before the listing. The environment variable BLOCKSIZE overrides the unit size of 512 bytes.