Hi Pual, I think this will do the trick...
$MAXSIZE = 5000000 $size = 0; @Zip_Now = (); foreach (@Files_to_zip) { $size += (stat $_)[7]; if ($size > $MAXSIZE) { exec "tar -vr -T @Zip_Now -f $tar_file"; # then burn this to CD @Zip_Now = (); } else { push (@Zip_Now, $_; } } If (scalar @Zip_Now) { exec "tar -vr -T @Zip_Now -f $tar_file"; } If you want to background the zip or the burn, then just for you script. If you use IDE disks though, it may not be a great idea to run a burn and a zip at the same time, as you are likely to get buffer underruns in your CD burn. R -----Original Message----- From: Paul Tremblay [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 21 September 2002 22:48 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: background process I am writing a script in perl to backup my system, and would like to run a backgroud process to burn each CD as it is created. Right now I use this command my $fail=system "tar -vr -T $files_to_back -f $tar_file"; to create a tar file. If the tar file is bigger than 650 M, then I will have to use split to split it into chunks. Needless to say, if backing up my whole hardrive, I will have many chunks. In fact, if my hardrive contains 10 G of info, I would need 10G of extra space just to run my script. So I want to create a background process. (I believe this is what I have to do, anyway.) I want tar to create 650M of info, and then stop while I create a disk image, burn the image, and then remove the image. I have looked in *Perl Cookbook,* but I couldn't really find any way to do this. I believe doing what I want is possible. There is a relativley simple script called backuponcd that does just this. But the script is written as a bash script, and I can't quite figure out what is going on. Thanks Paul PS I feel like I am re-inventing the wheel. I am sure there are a million good scripts and programs out there to backup. But I either can't get them to run, or they don't quite offer quite the ability to customize that I want. I would like the ability to append new files to old ones. For example, if I am working on a document called "my_story.txt", I will edit this story every day for several weeks. I want each version to be on a CD--in other words, there would be 21 copies of this story if I edited every day for three weeks. After all, I might do some bad editing on day 18 and really wish that I had a copy of the story that I did on day 15. Anyone know of a *well-documented* perl script that does what I want? -- ************************ *Paul Tremblay * *[EMAIL PROTECTED]* ************************ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]