I want to tar (and later gzip) a directory tree with s command like: tar czvf "/usr/local/stephen/backup.tar.gz" -C /home/logtest/public_html ./2006/ ./2007/ So before start taring I want to go to the base dir /home/logtest/public_html for that operation and then tar all subdirectories /2006/ and /2007/ (with relativ pathes). However when calling this command (in a perl script) I got the following error/warning: Warning: Use of "-C" without parentheses is ambiguous at /usr/local/stephen/bin/testscript.pl line 5. What's wrong ? According to the Gnu-tar help the option -C let me jump to the base directory before. Stephen