cpio misunderstanding?

[David Brodbeck]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Joe Kraft <jvk-list at thekrafts.org> wrote:
> OK, now I know what's going on.  I just don't know why.  The immutable flag
> was set on all these files, if you clear it cpio will happily copy them to
> the new directory.

Does cpio attempt to preserve flags?  Since the error is "could not
create," I'm wondering if it's trying to set the same flags on the
copy of the file and failing to do so.