Thanks, tall_man!

I actually did something similar to your suggestion (not having thought to look at the node to see if anyone had posted something interesting -- duh)

I did this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;
use constant SIZEOF_100MB => 104857600;

$| = 1;

my $filename = 'debugfile';

while (<>) {
    open LOGFILE, ">>$filename" ||
      die "Unable to open '$filename': $!";
    print LOGFILE $_;
    close LOGFILE;

    my @stats = stat($filename);
    my $bsize = $stats[7];

    if ( $bsize > SIZEOF_100MB ) {
        my @localtime = split / +|:/, localtime();
        shift @localtime;
        pop @localtime;

        my $new = "${filename}_" . join '_', @localtime;
  
        rename $filename, $new;

        system("gzip $new");
    } 
}

1;
[download]

It's probably not as elegant as your solution (I wasted more lines) but it does work.

Thanks again!