Is this a Perl question or general *nix?

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]

Suitable replacements for gzip included bzip2 and pigz.

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

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