kepler:

You can do it with Archive::ZIP. Just traverse your directory tree and add the files to the ZIP file.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

I am also not sure to understand whether you want to do it in Perl or not.

In addition to what is already suggested:
Read the man page for zip or tar, then choose from:

1. Using backticks. See perlop.
2. Using a pipe, where supported. See perlopentut and/or IPC::Open2.
3. Using system. See it's documentation.

(Also discussed in perlfaq8#How do I start a process in the background?)

~Thomas~ 

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."

Using just *nix commandline utilities, some ways to do this are:

  tar czvf ./directory-to-compress ./directory-to-compress.tgz
  # or equivalently
  tar cvf - ./directory-to-compress | gzip -c > ./directory-to-compres
+s.tar.gz
[download]

If you want to get crazy, you can use shar + gzip.

shar ./directory-to-compress | gzip -c > directory-to-compress.shar.gz
[download]

That you couldn't even be arsed to look at the manpages for tar(1), zip(1), Archive::Tar and Archive::Zip indicates to me that you don't actually care enough for me to bother helping you. You wouldn't even have to read very far down those pages, because the information you need is in the synopses for all four tools.