On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Janina Sajka wrote: > 600 certainly does help. Can you build a tar and chmod at the same time? Hmm, an interesting question. There are two ways to test this idea, which I will now attempt... Starting the tar process in one window (using screen), and in another listing the file in /tmp, shows, 644. Doing a chmod to 600, while the tar is still in progress, then listing the file again, shows 600. So that solution appears to work, as would, of course, backgrounding the tar process, and changing the mode. The other method: touch /tmp/ldtf.tbz chmod 600 /tmp/ldtf.tbz tar --bzip2 -cf /tmp/ldtf.tbz ~/ also acomplishes the task of keeping the file private, so I suppose the answer is yes, in all possible ways. > I realize we're splitting hairs here. So what? The more hairs you split, the more lessons you learn about hair. Put another way: in order to determine the means by which something operates, is frequently to split it open, and see! Luke