readdir() Just returns the bare filename itself. Likewise, -f and friends look in the current directory. When you run from /, you're getting filenames from $homedir and then looking for them in /.

Either prefix each element of @files with $homedir, or chdir( $homedir ) before doing -f (or stat() or open() or . . .).

#!/bin/sh
HOMEDIRBASE=/data/home
BACKUPDIRBASE=/data/SendTarHere
cd $HOMEDIRBASE
for DIRS in *
do
tar -cf ${BACKUPDIRBASE}/${DIRS}.tar $DIRS
done
[download]

Thanks, for that shell example, but my script is more complex. After getting the dir list, I do a multi-volume tar of it, gzip them,and then write it off to cdr, using ext2 format for the cdr. I'm going to post it later, after I test it a couple of more times. :-)

• You shouldn't use /^\.\.?$/ to throw away the special directories. $ will disregard a trailing newline, so you'll trip over files named "..\n" and such. The proper pattern would be /\A\.\.?\z/, but two humble eqs will do just as well ($_ ne '.' and $_ ne '..').
• As already mentioned, the file tests and everything else works off of the current directory, so you need to prepend any path you want to them to be relative to to the filename.
• You're looping over the filename list three times: once in the grep, then twice in one additional foreach loop per test. A lot of duplicated work.
• You first throw away the special directories, then every other entry that starts with a dot. Since both special directories start with a dot, why not pull these tests together?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use File::Spec::Functions qw(catfile);
use strict;

my @users = qw(/home/zentara);

foreach $homedir (@users) {
    my $dh;
    opendir $dh, $homedir
        or warn "Cannot readdir $homedir:$!\n";

    my @files =
        grep /\A[^.]/ and -f catfile($homedir, $_),
        readdir DIR;

    print "@files\n" . "#"x47 ." \n";
}
exit;
[download]

File::Spec::Functions provides importable versions of File::Spec's crossplatform functions for de/constructing pathnames. These modules are in the Perl core.

Update: s/readdir DIR/readdir $dh/

Makeshifts last the longest.

Sorry, you might have wanted to write...

opendir DIR, $homedir
        or warn "Cannot readdir $homedir:$!\n";
[download]

...instead of $dh :)

{

\

(

'

v

'

)

/

}

(

\

_

/

)

_

_

_

_

`

(

)

'

_

_

_

_

(

=

(

^

Y

^

)

=

(

_

_

^

^

^

^

_

_

_

_

\

_

(

m

_

_

_

m

)

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

)

c

h

i

a

n

o

,

a

l

b

e

r

t

o

Wherever I lay my KNOPPIX disk, a new FREE LINUX nation could be established

No, I wanted exactly what I wrote. What was wrong is that I had readdir DIR, which was supposed to be readdir $dh.

Makeshifts last the longest.