You're probably right, tar along would most likely be better than tgz. (It's very common to always see tar and the associated gzip together, so sometimes it takes a bit of insight to remember that they can be separated :-)

And yes, I realize that there's no need to stick to .tar; perl could care less what that extention is.

I think , as tilly suggested below, is that it might be best to start with a general plug-in system that allows people to handle what they want. (Plugins to that? hmmm, let's see what I can come up with... :-) ). Of course, I can see an initial step, that being of writing a hash tied to a tar archive (keys being filenames). While with this, there's issues with setting keys, assuming that one is simply reading from a tar, that would be a good way to store and retrieve the tar-stored files when needed.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important