Using Tar is no problem for me, but if I really wanted to use tar then I would have just wrote a bash script to do what I am trying to do instead I went with Perl to get the experience. The reason I tried to just point it to a directory was to see if it would act like Tar in the way that it would archive the contents of the directory automatcally then when that failed I knew what I had to do but don't know how to do it with out hard coding anything because the contents of the directory and subdirectories that I am wanting to archive are guaranteed to change that would mean every time I want to run the perl script i would have to rewrite it for the changes.