Testing an archive

Here is something that I ran into on several of my computer jobs. I would be asked by my manager to take over a project from a fellow worker. He would zip or tar up the files and then give me the archive. I would uncompress it on my system and try to begin the work. But there was always a file missing. It would often take two, three, or more attempts before I would finally have every file needed to compile the project. So, the moral to this story is when making an archive to give to someone else make absolutely sure to copy it to another machine and test it there. Only then can you be reasonably sure that you have included every file.