Thanks. It would seem that I didn't think past the obvious when reading the doc on Compress::Gzip. This would work fine, but I think that I am going to do what was suggested and just look for whatever compress program has been loaded onto the box. This way I can check for bzip2 then gzip and if all else fails just use compress.

This should allow me to use whatever the better compression binary is no matter what system I am on. I won't need to worry if the so-and-so libraries are on the destination machine or not.

Thanks for your solution. I am positive I will be using it in another project in the near future here.