Okay. Debian provides a pretty good man page for rmt, which, Greg, is in fact the program used for this purpose, according to the info pages on tar. It uses a reasonably simple protocol, which PERL could emulate enough to make this work, but I don't think that will be necessary. Because, the following syntax works nicely, exactly as is: tar --rsh-command=ssh --bzip2 -cf user at host:path/to/file.tbz files The only problem this seems to have, and I get the same thing with the ssh pipe, is that bzip2 seems to find garbage after EOF, in any bzip2 archive created with this method. Anyone have any idea what that is? All kinds of diffing, against the original and the backup, the backup and another backup done with a different method, and more, turns up no differences between the backed up directories, so it doesn't seem to matter much; but I still don't like it. Luke
