foo/bar is on NFS (or possibly some FUSE filesystem), that might be the problem. Either way, adding -O / –omit-dir-times to your command line will avoid it trying to set modification times on directories.
Use chown to change ownership and chmod to change rights. use the -R option to apply the rights for all files inside of a directory too. Note that both these commands just work for directories too. The -R option makes them also change the permissions for all files and directories inside of the directory. For example will change ownership (both user and group) … Read more