sjb (12/26/82)
My God, why is everyone reinventing the wheel? All you need to do is mv the directory you want to squish to some other directory, use 'cpio -pdum' to put the files back into the original directory, and get rid of the temporary directory. This works recursively, and when run as root it also preserves modes, owners, and groups; I'm not sure about setuid/setgid bits as I haven't tried it anywhere where they occur, but I'll do some testing. Thanx to Joe Presley for providing me with the original script utilizing cpio for this purpose.