[SOLVED] ls -l

Is this a consistent problem?

When I do

ls -l

then it shows a long output.

Suppose I want to do a particular directory, say

ls -l dirA

then instead of showing the permission etc, I get something like

ls -l Downloads/
total 0

But what I expect is

drwxrwxr-x 2 user user 4096 Jul 12 13:48 Downloads

What is the magic command? I know

ls -l | grep Downloads works, but that kind of a cheat.