graff: What you got is precisely what I expected for me too. But in my case when I run the script, it does everything EXCEPT it did NOT create the "test" and "qa" directories as it did for you. In my case it was just ignoring whatever folder name I was passing as part of the name. In which version of ActivePerl did you run this? It always used to work for me, but when I switched to a new machine and installed new Archive::Tar, the "folder" information isn't getting added to the archive file. Which means, when I add files to TAR as I show in the script, it adds all of them to the root, completely ignoring the folder info I am passing to "add_data" method. Please let me know which version you ran the script successfully under?