It appears that certain versions of JAVA JVM have a bug whereby the function File.mkdirs() returns false if there is a . in the end in the directory that is to be created, and the parent directory does not exist.

For e.g
if /tmp exists and /tmp/notexist does not exist, then JVM returns false if you try to create a directory /tmp/notexist/.

The attached TestFile illustrates this behavior.

In case of Pegasus, the submit directory creation fails if the user specifies . to --relative-dir option as is the case in running ihope on LIGO data grid