UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

Here is what I am trying to accomplish.

I am going to have one directory in which there will be files of varying types (Excel, Word, PPT, and possible others), and I need to be able to be bundle however many files there are in there together in to one file to be used as an e-mail attachment that I would like the recipient to be able to open and extract the files. The files would be for information only. The will not need to do anything to any directories on the recipients system.

I have tried tar and tar did what I wanted it to do as far as bundling them up into one file but upon extraction the files are unreadable. I saved the group files into a file and I told tar to use .zip for its extention. Perhaps I am a mere tweak away from using this but I don't know what else to do using this as a solution.

gzip, unless I am using it wrong, did not do what I need for it to do at all.

I use mpack to create the e-mail with the attachment and then use sendmail to send to the recipient.

I have read many of the other posts about gathering files but I think what I am attempting to do is not a repeat of what has been asked before.

Thanks for any help that can be given.

Did you uuencode your file before emailing it out?

No, I did not. Not familiar with uuencode.

... thus possibly triggering the wrong (i.e. unzip) mechanism to untar the mislabeled archive (?).