Sometimes, you'll want to look at a directory, rather than inside it. For these situations, you can specify the -d option, which will tell ls to look at any directories that it would normally look inside:

$ ls -dl /usr /usr/bin /usr/X11R6/bin ../share
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root           96 Dec 18 18:17 ../share
drwxr-xr-x   17 root     root          576 Dec 24 09:03 /usr
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         3192 Dec 26 12:52 /usr/X11R6/bin
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root        14576 Dec 27 08:56 /usr/bin