If you have tar locally installed then another solution may be a pipeline. The exact options depend on the version of tar. For instance to produce a gzipped tar file using GNU tar try the following:

my $cmd = "tar -T - -cvz -";
open (TAR, "| $cmd") or die "Cannot run '$cmd': $!";
print TAR map "$_\n", @files;
close TAR;
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One nice thing about this is that this is incremental. Data starts streaming immediately without having to store all of the data in memory.