>	Why not ;-) a little extra baggage in the gnu versions would
>surely not be noticed...
>
>	Something simple, like an environment variable checked by
>install, cp, ln, mv, tar, cpio, zip & unzip. My contribution will be
>the name of the environment variable - but I'll have to think about it
>first...

It occurs to me that, being careful enough, you _could_ finangle with
chroot() and do something that might work (you'd have to copy some stuff to
the newly-chrooted space, but I think it might work ...).

--Ken