No CPAN modules? This version tars and gzips and allows the user to override a lot of default names. Instead of placing all arguments in another file, this one accepts long style arguments. Since the number of files to archive could be large, it does accept a textfile containing the list of files to archive.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Archive::Tar;
use Getopt::Long;
use Pod::Usage;

use vars qw($base $dir $name $comp $list @file $debug $help);
GetOptions(
   'base=s' => \$base,
   'dir=s'  => \$dir,
   'name=s' => \$name,
   'comp=s' => \$comp,
   'list=s' => \$list,
   'file=s' => \@file,
   'debug!' => \$debug,
   'help|?' => \$help,
);

pod2usage(-verbose=>1) if $help;
pod2usage(-verbose=>2) unless $name and $list or @file;

$base ||= '.';
$comp ||= 9;
$dir  = (localtime)[7];

print "BaseDIR: $base\n" if $debug;
die "$base is not a directory" unless -d $base;

if ($list) {
   open FH,'<',$list or die "couldn't open $list: $!";
   chomp(@file = <FH>);
}

my $tardir = "$base/$dir";

print "archive is $tardir/$name\n" if $debug;
print "files are @file\n" if $debug;

if (-d "$tardir") {
   print "$tardir already exists\n" if $debug;
}
else {
   mkdir "$tardir", 0740 or die "cannot mkdir $tardir";
   print "created $tardir\n" if $debug;
}

my $tar = Archive::Tar->create_archive("$tardir/$name",$comp,@file);

__END__
=head1 NAME

backup.pl -- backup files listed in text file or command line

=head1 SYNOPSIS

backup.pl -list|-file [-dir -name -args -debug -help]

Options:

   -name    required - name of tar file: 

   -file    required - specify files to archive or ...

   -list    text file containing list of files to srchive

   -base    dir to store tar directory: default is .

   -dir     dir to store tar file: day of year is default

   -comp    compression level: default is 9

   -debug   prints debugging messages

   -help    this message

Examples:

backup.pl -list=backlist.txt -name=foo.tar 

backup.pl -file=foo.txt -file=bar.txt -name=foo.tar 

=cut
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