I\'m looking for any advice/intuition/clues/answers on a permission issue that has been plaguing me ever since I switched over to a new Macbook pro. Here\'s the dilemma. Certain
It sounds like the folder isn't world executable. Try:
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/lib
and then you should be able to use ls or anything else in the folder (still won't allow you to write but your user account shouldn't be able to do that anyway)