...if you compress /home/users/you/dir/ you will have home/users/you/dir

Obviously it's a feature of the compression that I'd not noticed 'til now - a gotcha I'll be sure to remember from here on in...

<c> ...you can't force him to unpack on /

..which, IMO, just goes to show that the use of compressed tar(1) files is not the way to go from the POV of software delivery where delivery of absolute files is frequently an immutable requirement.

A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))

You can also compress using the -C option, to change to that directory, and then you will have relatives paths. for example: /home/users/you/dir I can compress using: tar -czf example.tar.gz -C /home/users/you dir And you will get a tar with the directory dir.

...fails to preserve absolute paths

The regular tar program has the same (default) behavior (so it's not all that surprising).   (GNU-)tar, however, has an option to disable the feature (-P/--absolute-names : don’t strip leading ‘/’s from file names). A cursory scan of the Archive::Tar docs did not locate anything similar, but maybe if you look more carefully, you'll find something...

The idea is to just cd into the desired top-level directory before unpacking.

    The regular tar program has the same default) behavior...

This isn't, or at least wasn't, the default behaviour on either Solaris or AIX ... or even HP-UX for that matter.

A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))

$Archive::Tar::INSECURE_EXTRACT_MODE This variable indicates whether Archive::Tar should allow files to be extracted outside their current working directory. Allowing this could have security implications, as a malicious tar archive could alter or replace any file the extracting user has permissions to. Therefor, the default is to not allow insecure extractions. If you trust the archive, or have other reasons to allow the archive to write files outside your current working directory, set this variable to true. Note that this is a backwards incompatible change from version 1.36 and before.

Another clue in the documentation supporting the theory that Archive::Tar will support extracting absolute paths is the documentation for the Archive::Tar->extract_archive($file, $compressed) function:

Extracts the contents of the tar file. The first argument can either be the name of the tar file to create or a reference to an open file handle (e.g. a GLOB reference). All relative paths in the tar file will be created underneath the current working directory.

That implies that absolute paths have a different behavior--perhaps using the absolute path. You ought to give it a try and report back for posterity.

...roboticus

Who really ought to try Archive::Tar sometime...