`perldoc PerlIO'
I don't know if it'll work, but try something like this (untested):

use strict;
use warnings;

my $infile = 'hi.txt';
my $outfile = 'hi.gz';

open my $in, '<:raw', $infile or die $!;
open my $out, '>:gzip', $outfile or die $!;

while(defined( my $read = read $in, my $s, 2048 ) ){
    die "Error reading 2048: $!" if $read != 2048;
    print {$out} $s;
}

close $in;
close $out;
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