Skip> Next step was to try extracting the tarfile (that generated with Skip> -o and -O) on another Solaris 8 system. That worked fine, so I Skip> will assume the problem is on the first machine I tried. Belay that. The other machine had GNU tar in /usr/local/bin... With /usr/bin/tar I get the same problem. Off-list John Abel suggested perhaps it might be a path length problem. I was more concerned about filenames containing spaces or non-ASCII characters but didn't find any smoking guns. Looking at the characters in the filenames, I didn't see any files whose name wasn't matched by this regular expression: [-:A-Za-z.0-9 _()]+ In addition to several files containing spaces, there is a directory component named "(vise)" which seems a bit odd, but which should be okay for tar. Next check was on the length of things as John had suggested. The longest component is only 110 characters: ./Mac/OSXResources/app/Resources/English.lproj/Documentation/macpython_ide_tutorial/entering_in_new_window.gif but is in the directory where tar craps out. I then generated another tarfile which excluded just the .../macpython_ide_tutorial directory. That extracts fine: bash-2.03$ /usr/bin/tar xf ../tmp/Py2.3.tar bash-2.03$ Just or Jack, is there any chance we can rearrange the Mac subtree to shorten up that long path? I don't know if it's the number of directory components or the total length of the path that's causing the problem. In the meantime, perhaps it's worth noting on the website that extracting the tarfile on some platforms may fail. Skip