Apparently, according to my downvotes, I suck. I thought this was a genuinely useful comment on the user's question. I'm new to perlmonks, and I'd like any advice that might lead to me sucking less.

Your downvotes aren't an indicator that you suck, just that your answer does. Although you are sort of correct (tar files are just some header data and the concatenated files) you missed the fact that tar headers can contain \r or \n, so your suggestion wouldn't work. At least not all of the time... which is, of course, even worse because you really don't want something that only breaks some of the time. ;-)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";