>No, because we pipe the downloaded package immediately into a "tar vxf -"
>to not waste the diskspace for holding the pkg twice.

Why not make this be dependent on some enviroment variable being set,
say like "SAVE_TAR_FILES".  Then if a tar file was complete and correct,
it wouldn't have to fetch it again.

-- 
Phil Nelson
e-mail: philnelson@home.com  (Work: phil@cs.wwu.edu)
web: members.home.com/philnelson