Sebastian Unger wrote:
> Why is it trying to open the directory
> in the first place?

Security.

Apparently POSIX doesn't allow this level of paranoia for mkdir -p, so I removed 
it in the attached Gnulib patch, and this should appear in the next coreutils 
release.

A filesystem that doesn't let you read your own directory that you just created 
is likely to run into other problems like this -- i.e., the practice may 
introduce more security problems than it closes.  But I digress.