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? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.