I took your code and down loaded it, then I realized a few things:

A) you left out the first brace on the line

 next unless $file =~ /\.t(?:ar\.)?gz\z/);
# it should be
next unless ($file =~ /\.t(?:ar\.)?gz\z/);
[download]

That was not meant to flame you, just to point it out for others who read this.

<ident>B) Your script runs into the same flaw as mine: It expands the archives in the CWD. I read the manual on tar, but it was older than tar, so the option I thought should work didn't. Really all I think I need to do is to change the current working directory to whatever $ARGV[0] is at the time. That should solve it. Thanx again for the regex compression. i re-wrote mine as this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$|++;
use strict;
my (@list, $d, $i);
die "Need Directory Param!\n" unless $ARGV[0];
my $cmd = qq/tar -zxvf /;
opendir LOCAL,$ARGV[0] || die "Cannot Open dir $ARGV[0]";
@list = readdir LOCAL;
foreach $d (0..$#list)
{
    if($list[$d] =~ /.+\.t?(ar\.)?gz/)
    {
        qx/$cmd $ARGV[0]\/$list[$d]/;
        $i++;
    }
}
print "$i files expanded!\n";
closedir LOCAL;
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Of Course this is still a few lines larger than yours, but you see, this is my code and I kept it how i originally wrote it. No offense to you, but that is your code. Besides the fact that I did not explain my whole purpose in writing this program. I am going to expand this and need to have the directory read into an array for later use. Thanx again.

<straywalrus>