in reply to Using Archive::Tar on tar data already in memory

Hello, I would like to use Compress::Bzip2 and Archive::Tar on a directory of .tar.bz2 files to extract the contents. I am able to use Compress::Bzip2 to uncompress the files, but I am unable to then use Archive::Tar to extract the files after by using the uncompressed tar data that is in a variable.

How are you "unable" to do that? I don't know Archive::Tar, but reading its documentation I find that

$tar->read ( $filename|$handle, $compressed, {opt => 'val'} ) Read the given tar file into memory. The first argument can either be the name of a file or a reference to an already open filehandle (or an IO::Zlib object if it's compressed) The second argument indicates

and also that

Note that you can currently not pass a "gzip" compressed filehandle, which is not opened with "IO::Zlib", nor a string containing the full archive information (either compressed or uncompressed). These are worth while features, but not currently implemented. See the "TODO" section.

However you should be able to trick it with an in-memory filehandle - suppose you full archive is in $tarcontent:

# untested open my $fh, '<', \$tarcontent or die "D'oh! $!\n"; my $tar=Archive::Tar->new($fh);