In addition to Archive::Zip, there's also IO::Uncompress::Unzip, which is a core module in the standard Perl distro. You can open a zip file, read each data file it contains into memory (i.e. store the file content in a scalar variable), and if any data file happens to be named with a ".zip" extension, there's a way to treat the scalar variable (holding the embedded zip file content) as a file handle, so you can use the module to unzip that as well.