Quick googling around, and it seems like this behavior (in Ubuntu) changed somewhere near the end of 2008: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+

Quick googling around, and it seems like this behavior (in Ubuntu) changed somewhere near the end of 2008: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/174283/comments/10 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/174... tl;dr That's when coreutils Ubuntu package switched from "--no-preserve-root" to "--preserve-root" by default.