fail to allow extraction with either WinZip or PowerArchiver.

Yes. Its unlikely that the CPAN authors will have spent any time supporting these commercial (and typically GUI based) compression tools. I know that there are command line versions available for both of them, but its unlikely that CPAN knows how to talk to them properly. But Im only guessing as Ive not investiagted deeper.

This is puzzling and implies that there's yet snother compression utility out there somewhere that may not be quite compatible with the ones I know about.

Yep. There sure are other compression tool, and yes some of them quite possibly are not supported by either commercial tool. bzip probably isnt supported by either for instance. I dont know if they are compress compatible as well. (Although they should be.) Anyway, we could list compression schemes that these tools dont support till the cows come home. :-) The real question you want answered is what compression tools should you get your hands on to get CPAN to work correctly. And the answer is simple. Install cygwin which is a standard unix tool set ported to Win32. In it you will find ports of the standard compression tools zip, gzip, unzip and tar. It is these tools that CPAN knows how to play with. But no stress, Winzip is and powerarchiver should be fully compatible with their compression.

As an added bonus the tools set contains such conveniences like diff, patch, find, xargs, head, tail, wget, etc that are missing from the Win32 toolset. Once you know they are there and how to use them working without them is like painting when you are missing three of your favorite colors. :-)

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demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}