My script is made up of code I wrote, plus the standard PEAR Tar and Zip classes. My code builds a list of files to be backed up. That part is working fine. It filters out . and .. and really, all it does is pass an array of file names and directory names to the Tar/Zip class's add() method. The error I'm seeing happens within the call to add(). I'll check, but I have to believe that the folks over at the PEAR project are smart enough to filter out the . and .. entries when reading a directory. Also, this script works just fine everywhere except at this one host. My guess is that it's a permission problem, probably a file ownership not file attribute thing. All the docs I can find say that stat() will return an error code if it fails--like, there should be an "errno = ##" part of the error message to tell me why it failed. But, I don't get such an errno in my output. Thanks for all your suggestions so far. Tim