Archive::Zip is what you want. You can get it from CPAN by following that link or probably more conveniently from Active State as a PPM precompiled binary (in zip format :-) here http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/6xx-builds-only/

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

On NT I have sucessfully used Archive::Tar and Compress::Zlib to make a .tar.gz file. .tar.gz files can be read by most recent versions of WinZip, and most *nix systems without a problem.

In general, but not always, they tend to be smaller than zip files. I don't know what the conditions are that make gzip more efficient, I assume someone does, but I use .tar.gz by default as I find it's better most of the time.

I think that Block Sorting Compression BZip2 is more efficient than either zip or Gzip on text files, but there wasn't a PPD for it for NT last time I looked, and it won't build from CPAN unless you have a compiler, and the bzip pieces to hand.

Though it's not strictly Perl, but RedHat CygWin provides command line versions of zip, unzip, tar, gzip, bzip2 and lots of other cool *nix tools (including Perl), already compiled for Windows, and these all work okay too.

Using Archive::Zip:

#!/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;
use Archive::Zip qw( :ERROR_CODES :CONSTANTS);

#almost verbatim from the Archive::Zip docs:
my $zip = Archive::Zip->new();
my $member = $zip->addFile('t.out');
die 'Error writing file' if $zip->writeToFileNamed('foo.zip') != AZ_OK
+;
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#!/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;
require 5.004; #using TIEHANDLE interface
use IO::Zlib;

tie *FILE, 'IO::Zlib', "foo.txt.gz", "wb";

#do your stuff here
#everything written to FOO gets compressed and stored in foo.gz
print FILE "hello world\n";
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