UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

To invoke utime() you must:
1) own the file or be root
2) have write permission on the file or be root

My guess is that your archive has files owned by you but read only.

Yes, but the funny thing is, I either owned every file or had full rights to it as it was in my primary group.

It is some weird thing with the server, but I have no access to that level of it. If I did it wouldn't be RHEL.

What kind of filesystem are you extracting it on to?

There is no such thing as "full rights" to a file you do not own unless you are root. Invoking utime() is not reading, nor writing, nor executing a file. You must own the file or you do not have the right to invoke utime(). This is a posix mandated restriction.

Other things you can't do to a file you don't own even if the permissions are 777: chmod, chgrp, and chown. Many OS's won't allow chown even by the non-root owner, but allowing a non-root non-owner to chown a file is a posix violation. All of these things affect the inode, not the data. You can have full right to the data in a file you don't own, but not to the metadata that describes the file. The metadata belongs only to the file owner.

Why dont you just try to run script as root under empty directory and if it works, so we can say problem is of permissions.

- nilesh

I do not have that level of access. This is a server setup by our network department for us to develop on.

It is an ext3 partition that is apparently on a SAN.