I'm also using up-to-date cygwin and can't duplicate your problem--it untar's fine for me, either via cpan or manual download/tar xvfz libwww-perl-5.57.tar.gz. If you ask cygwin@cygwin.com for help, be sure to follow the instructions in http://cygwin.com/problems.html (particularly attaching cygcheck -s -v -r output) or they will yell at you.