crouchingpenguin, thanks for the suggestion. I don't like the IO::Scalar solution very much, for the same reasons I don't like using IO::String in perl 5.8.x: in-memory filehandles should work out of the box (at least this is what I thought). I tried to code a quick solution here just to work around the problem without the need to install yet another module.

There is also another reason why I don't like IO::Scalar very much: it does not work with Archive::Zip. This is where all really started: you can't pass an in-memory filehandle to Archive::Zip, simply because it contains a seekability test that will fail. And, sadly enough, it will explicitly fail for IO::Scalar as well.