tar brain damage?

[Dave Martindale]

V7 tar wrote only files, and information about them, to tape.  When extracting
from tape, it is bright enough to call mkdir if necessary to create a
directory, but mkdir just creates it with the default mode and there is
no information on tape to do a better job.  The 4.1BSD tar writes entries
for directories as well as files on the tape (by default - you can write
tapes compatible with the old tar if you want) and thus can recreate the
mode and owner on extraction.  This will also recreate empty directories.