Other Monks have pointed out the errs in your ways, so I won't go there, I'll just expand... I would personally use Archive::Extract so your code doesn't have to shell out. Said module has been part of perl's core since pre-v5.10. Also note that I use a file glob (<*.ext>) to slurp in the file names, which retain their full path information (this eliminates another system call (ls)). Here's an example:

use warnings;
use strict;

use Archive::Extract;

my $inputs = "~/inputs";
my $results = "/home/steve/results";

my @files = <$inputs/*.tar.gz>;

for (@files){
    my $ae = Archive::Extract->new(archive => $_);

    $ae->extract(to => $results)
      or die "couldn't decompress the damned $_ file!: " . $ae->error;

    print "decompressed $_\n";
}
[download]

For some reason, extract() wouldn't recognize the homedir shortcut, so I just entered in the full path. I'm sure it can expand it somehow, I just don't have the time to troubleshoot.