Ara Howard wrote:
> IO.popen 'tar cfz -', 'w+' do |pipe|
> 
> end
> 
> and just send files down the pipe

Uh??

"tar cfz -" creates a tarfile called "z" and tries to pack a file called 
"-" in it.

"tar czf - file1 file2 file3" reads the named files from disk and sends 
the *output* to stdout.

If you don't specify any files, then nothing is created:

  $ tar -czf -
  tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
  Try `tar --help' or `tar --usage' for more information.

That's for gnu tar, maybe others work differently. However, as far as I 
know, you can't get tar to read the *content* of files on stdin - and 
even if you could, how would you format them? That is, how would you 
delimit the start and end of each file, and assign a name to each one?
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