Your script doesn't work because you are using single quotes inside system(...), and perl will not expand variables inside single quotes. Change single quotes to double quotes and it will work -

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
chomp(my @list=`ls *.tar`);
foreach (@list) {
  system "tar -xvf $_";
}

[download]
Note that you don't have to untar a single file at a time, tar is quite happy to accept multiple files at the same time:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
chomp(my @list=`ls *.tar`);
system "tar -xvf " . qq{@{[@list]}};

[download]
And better still, you don't even need to write a script at all, just type this at the shell prompt:
tar -xvf *.tar

[download]
 Update: Thanks to sauoq for pointing out my mistake with tar and multiple input files.

In reply to Re: untarring number of files by Roger
in thread untarring number of files by agent

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