Hashes are more efficient to execute than this kind of explicit logic. Consider this untested code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use vars qw( $cmd_match %decomp_cmd %decomp_handler );

(scalar @ARGV) || die "Usage: $0 file(s)\n";

%decomp_cmd = (
  '.tar.gz' => 'tar -zxvf $_',
  '.tgz' => 'tar -zxvf $_',
  '.bz2' => 'tar -Ixvf $_',
  '.z' => 'uncompress -dc $_| tar -xvf -',
  '.zip' => 'unzip $_',
);

# Set up subs
foreach (keys %decomp_cmd) {
  $decomp_handler{$_} = eval qq(
    sub {
      if (system "$decomp_cmd{$_}") {
        die("Cannot run '$decomp_cmd{$_}': $! (ret $?)\n");
      }
    }
  );
}

# Set up match
{
  my $str = join "|", map {quotemeta($_)} keys %decomp_cmd;
  $cmd_match = qr/$str/;
}

foreach (@ARGV) {
  if (/($cmd_match)$/) {
    $decomp_handler{$1}->();
  }
  else {
    warn("Don't know what to do with $_\n");
  }
}

[download]
Definitely overkill here. But you see the concept. It will perform quite well, is easy to extend, and moves all of the logic you should ever want to change into one place.

In reply to RE (tilly) 1: Expand your world by tilly
in thread Expand your world by jlp

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