OUTPUT
lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on
Might make sense if directory was coming from a NFS server or some other form of NAS. Depending on server config, root on client might not be able to delete files, and server might not support file attributes.
As to why only this directory had problems, I'll just speculate that the NFS configuration (or NFS client or server software) changed in some relevant manner sometime after the directory was created. I would have been curious if
ls -l showed on the server ownership was root, your username, or nobody.
One additional speculation, if this directory was created by un-taring a gcc distribution as root, maybe the directory picked up some funky ownership/permissions from the tar archive, rather than directories and files you created directly
REFERENCES
