Nah I am just an intern doing what I was asked, they said that there are too many cracks out there designed just to crack password protected Zips that they dont want to use Zip format. I just shrug and try to find another way to get things done. From my research so far it seems that installing some type of encryption program and then writing a script, that first creates the .tar then encrypts it, seems the easiest and almost the only way to go about this. As far as security they are pretty strickt on pws here, not allowed to be written down or even spoken out loud. And each level has a different set of passwords. Yea well anyway just trying to get this solved cause I like going out and doing this stuff, the whole get a problem go out and find the best solution. Thanks for the advice so far though.