Correct - I wasn't able to explain it so succinctly, though, and didn't provide any examples of what I meant. Thanks for reading my code (and mind!) to figure out what problem I was trying to solve :)

Besides the problem already pointed out by Brother blyman, I think there's a second one: permissions (and ownership) for directories (and files) are not preserved.

Yep, I did some monkeying around and realized that my program wasn't getting that info, so couldn't possibly do anything with it.

I believe that the original problem can be solved with a one-pass program because the intent is to extract all files to a different root directory; a future enhancement would be to extract only selected files to some arbitrary directory.

I ++'ed you for a great reply; it's gotten me thinking in new directions, so thanks.

blyman
setenv EXINIT 'set noai ts=2'