note Illuminatus Another check of the <b>unzip</b> man page yields the likely reason for your problem. Closing a pipe causes the writer (unzip in this case) to receive SIGPIPE. unzip subsequently returns a non-zero exit status (sets $? to SIGPIPE, or 13), which may be causing <b>croak</b> to fire. You may want to change you logic to not croak if the close fails, but $? is set to 13<p><b>fnord</b></p> 896172 896220