Echoing what's already been said here, I agree that either Archive::Zip or Compress::Zlib and Archive::Tar are your best bets. If you need to compress multiple files into one zip archive that is readable on Windows, I would recommend Archive::Zip. However, if you only need to compress one file (and if that one file happens to be the output of your program) my recommendation is IO::Zlib. This is great module that lets you create an IO handle that reads or writes a gzip compressed file. Here are some snippets to get your started:

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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using IO::Zlib:

#!/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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If you want to use Compress::Zlib and Archive::Tar then just read the docs but I doubt it's very difficult. The above two are certainly straightforward and easy.