Copying 1000s files and showing the progress

Hello All I have a situation where I have to copy something like 1000 files one by one to a temporary folder. Tar it using the system tar command and let the user download the tar file. Now while the copy is going on at server, I want to show some progress to the user at client side. Most of the tutorial I found on net was about showing progress while a file is being uploaded from client to server. In this case the client has the info but for my case, the client has no info. A similar was problem was solved at http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/perl/cgi-upload-hook.html but its in PERL and uses some form of hook. I have no clue how to do it in PHP. Any clues or right direction would be awesome. -- Ritesh http://www.riteshn.com