Perhaps (likely) your Archive::Tar object is not going out of scope so the tar files are held open and hence you run out of file handles. Show us the code.

Here is the sample code :

use strict;

my $base_loc = "/base/location";

my @results = (   'QFU010508.865714.tar.gz'
                , 'AAL_AGG.738208.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU010508.870496.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU010508.870512.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU010508.1017611.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU010508.1018350.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU020508.784543.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU020508.735377.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU020508.784632.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU020508.784637.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU020508.784641.tar.gz'
                , 'QFU020508.869793.tar.gz'
              );

foreach my $tar_file ( @results ) {
    my $path_to_file = $base_loc . "/" . $tar_file;
    my $extracts             =  Archive::Tar->new( $path_to_file );
    print "Goin to sleep...\n";

    sleep(5);
    if( !defined $extracts ) {
        print "INFO: Could not find : $tar_file file or Archive is not
+ valid\n";
    }
    else {
        print "INFO: Processed $tar_file file\n";
    }

#Destroy the object
    undef $extracts;

    print "Object should get destroyed now, sleeping again.\n";
    sleep(5);
}
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During running the above code, we can see that the memory consumption keeps on increasing ( using top ) even after object gets destroyed.

In future, post code in code tags - read Markup in the Monastery. Your $extracts variable goes out of scope each iteration so the object should be destroyed without you doing anything.