I agree with you 100% and my original answer had open my $in, "tar -ztvvf $filename|" and a regex to catch the file size. But I didn't want to then explain finding and installing tar.exe, so I used the module instead. It's the same basic idea, but even easier with open imo...

Besides, are you sure it reads the whole file into memory for the list_files()? I thought that was only for the unpack. Yeah, it definitely does. In my opinion, it shouldn't do that, oh well.