Thanks, but I still get only one entry in @results. I figure I should get one entry as the contents of the .tar.bz2, and one as whatever is returned by ;echo \$\{PIPESTATUS\[\@\]\}. Later code writes $results[0] to a file, which bunzip2 reports as corrupt, hence I figure that the backtick method is unable to separate the output of bzip2 -9 -c from ;echo \$\{PIPESTATUS\[\@\]\}.