MidLifeXis,
Your advice may not help jkhunt. It sounds like it is possible that the packages are being placed over time and are not all available up front for packing. That makes the question:

How can I tell how much free space is used in a list of directories? 

use Cwd;
use constant LIMIT => 4 * 1024 * 1024 * 1000;

my @dirs;  # perhaps found with File::Find
for my $dir (@dirs) {
    my $avail = LIMIT - dir_size($dir);
    print "'$dir' has $avail free\n";
}    

sub dir_size {
    my ($dir) = @_;
    my $orig_dir = getcwd;
    chdir '$dir' or die "Unable to chdir to '$dir': $!";
    open(my $dh, '.') or die "Unable to open a dir handle for '$dir': 
+$!";
    my $size;
    while (<$dh>) {
        next if ! -f $_;
        $size += -s $_;  # could use _ shortcut
    }
    chdir $orig_dir or die "Unable to restore dir to '$orig_dir': $!";
    return $size;
}

[download]

If, on the other hand, the packages are all available up front - I too would recommend a "good enough" algorithm rather than finding the perfect solution.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re^2: Help with Space Efficency algorithim by Limbic~Region
in thread Help with Space Efficency algorithim by jkhunt

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