[wyldfire]

That was typical on DOS/Windows when distributing ZIP archives, for a long time.

But on *nix systems, the idiom for tarballs usually includes a directory containing all of the contents.

> (And when I create one, I always have to check/look up what happens, so it doesn't surprise me that a variety of things get done at all.)

True - I usually do a `tar tf foo.tar.xz |head` to get a quick peek at the archive. This generally avoids the problem of dumping a bunch of files into the current directory.