I was told specificly that I need to find a way to do it with .tar files. They don't want to use Zip because the passwords aren't that secure. Or so I was told.

Ok so I apologize for not searching for this before I posted, but everywhere else I have gone I haven't seen a single thing about this. I see in another thread, and the suggestion was use the tar command in conjunction with PGP encryption for the password protection. My new question is this process scriptable, and is the encryption secure?