Thanks for the advice, everyone. Very helpful...I hadn't considered the issue with someone else accessing a file while it's being compressed. I'll do the rename thing to try to avoid that. The big question that I was initially concerned about, though is with the directory structure itself. So if I'm walking a tree named something like /one/two/three/four/five/six/seven...I'm down in there reading directory "seven", and then someone comes along and does a "mv /one/two /one/two_old". Is my whole process hung with File::Find? Thanks. Oh, and yes...I'm logging everything I do in the most paranoid way possible :-) And luckily, CIFS shouldn't be an issue in this case.