I am currently using IO::Socket::SSL to create the Socket connection between the two machines. I will try OPEN a file handler for the tar command and see if I can get it to the other end compressed.

Using Expect would be fine if I were at home and didn't really care for password protection. However, I do not like leaving passwords in files that could later be broken into, even with file permissions and what not.

netcat could have been a usable solution, but I don't think a secure SSL socket can be create in perl with it. I will have to look into this more to see if this could actually be done.