lsattr: Permission denied While reading flags on directory

Question

This question is risen from Undeletable directory in lost+found

I have a directory which I cannot delete and it seems like the reason of that is wrong attrbiutes ('immutable' on that dir or 'append only' on the parent one or something like that), but I cannot even list permissions of that dir:

/tmp/2 sudo lsattr
lsattr: Permission denied While reading flags on ./#1589030

How is it possible and what could be the reason?

UPDATE In the original question, there were steps to reproduce:

cd /tmp
wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22701362/broken.tar.xz
tar xvf broken.tar.xz
mkdir test
sudo mount broken.iso test
sudo lsattr test/2

While it was reported that it returns

---D-ad--j--T--- 2/#1589030 

On both my machine and my work station in returns:

lsattr: Permission denied While reading flags on test/2/#1589030

Solution

I had a similar problem on an ext4 filesystem.

The solution was: unmount filesystem, use debugfs in interactive mode. It is similar to a shell and allows to do many operations bypassing all permissions, including deleting files and directories.