Why not use the perl module Archive::Tar instead of the system call.

Archive::Tar requires that the entire tarball is in memory, which for situations of large files is not cool at all and thus its much better, essential really, to shell out to Tar.exe directly.

For anyone feeling brave a rewrite of Archive::Tar to use temp files would be an interesting and useful project. (Come to think of it, i'm speaking of Version 0.072 here. I havent looked at later versions if there are any.)

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demerphq