Yes, a file with a gz extension is still a file^*.

Here is an example that shows two ways to get the size of a file: using the file test -s (see -X in perlfunc) and the function stat. Note that both of these may not be 100% portable, as per the docs.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = 'find_my_size.tar.gz';

my $size = -s $file;
print "size of $file by -s is $size\n";

my @filedata = stat $file;
print "size of $file by stat is $filedata[7]\n";
[download]

^*Unless it's a directory that ends in .gz, etc

use File::Stat;
my $size = (stat($filename))[7];
print "File size with \"File::Stat\" $size \n";
[download]

If you want the size of the things inside the file, then you'd probably need to use tar. They say /bin/tar is faster, but Archive::Tar is more portable...

use strict;
use warnings;
use Archive::Tar;

die "no file?" unless $ARGV[0] and -f $ARGV[0];

my $size = 0;
my @arch = Archive::Tar->new($ARGV[0])->list_files([qw(size)]);

$size += $_->{size} for @arch;

eval "use Number::Format";
if( $@ ) {
    print "$size\n";

} else {
    my $fmt = new Number::Format;
    print "", $fmt->format_bytes( $size, 1), "\n";
}
[download]

-Paul

Archive::Tar is more portable...

GNU tar (compiled C) is freely available for all platforms that run Perl, can't be beat for speed, and will always work regardless of how big the tar file happens to be.

(The only OS-dependent limitation, last time I checked, is that on mswin, you can't do things like "tar czf file.tar.gz source/" or "tar xzf file.tar.gz" or "tar tzvf file.tar.gz", to handle gzip compression directly -- you have to do "gzip" or "gunzip" as a separate step.)

Meanwhile, Archive::Tar tries to accommodate both uncompressed and compressed tar files by always loading the full, uncompressed tar file contents into memory, which means that it won't handle really large tar files. (In this sense, it's "less portable".)

hmmm... if you're using File::stat (not File::Stat! Odd, but it seems like someone uploaded a File::Stat to CPAN :p ), then you can use it like this:

use File::stat;
printf qq(File size with "File::stat" is %s\n), stat($filename)->size;
[download]

And unlike File::Stat, File::stat is a CORE module...