Try this.,

If suppose there is a tar file by name "files_test.tar" in desktop and you want to untar them,see the below code..it worked fine for me.

use Archive::Tar;
chdir("C:/Documents and Settings/John_Kinn/Desktop");
my $tar = Archive::Tar->new;
$tar->read("files_test.tar", 1);
my @files = $tar->list_files();
print "I can see @files in th specified location.\n";
$tar->extract(@files);
print "The files are untared\n";