I have experienced similar behaviour, except that, with me, after I do an archive extraction, or a file concatenation of many files, while the file system only shows one set of files, additional files which were deleted after the extraction, continue to be listed as existing when I try to do operations on the directory as a whole.
$ cp -R dir new/ Failure! Cannot copy some non-existent file. $ cp -R dir/*.x new/ Works. It is very strange. -- ((name "Aaron Hsu") (email/xmpp "[EMAIL PROTECTED]") (phone "703-597-7656") (site "http://www.aaronhsu.com")) [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]