I knew someone would post "show us your code"! But seriously, my problem isn't the code, it's that I don't understand the POD for Archive::Zip. Here's a perfect example.

The "root" option sounds like the destination directory that will hold the unarchived/uncompressed copy of the recursive tree.

Yes, it does. But it isn't. There's a totally separate destination option. It told me that the "root" option would be used to extract everything beginning with that string, so, as the folder I wanted to extract started with "c" (it was called "content"), I used "c" as the root and got a folder called "ontent". Maybe it's just me but I don't understand the documentation.