This makes sense if you're dealing with some form of compression other than "gzip"

I think he is. The way I read his post, it seems he's using Zip compression (i.e., PKWare format). There is of course also a module on CPAN for that (Archive::Zip), but if portability is superfluous the pipe he's using is more efficient in terms of programmer time. (If portability were desired, the CPAN module would be vastly preferable, however. Otherwise you have to worry about the syntax differences between pkzip, pkzipc, info-zip, and whatever else, and which one is installed, and... the module is going to make porting easier.)

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}
[download]