Hah, a funny way to cheat dawned upon me. Basically, use a shared storage space to put the info from the compressed file in.

Both environments (where compression happens and where decompression happens) have to have access to the shared storage space. Then the compressor just puts info into the shared storage, and the decompressor fetches it from there. (Could work for lab assistants just copying challenges from a book?)

E.g., lets assume we have internet access.

1. Request a file of length 100 MB (just to make sure we stay in the limit while using a perl with libraries).
2. Compressor: Copy file to publicly accessible website and put URL in a text file (wow - easy compression that is).
3. Decompressor: script along the lines of lwp-request from standard distribution that takes its argument from text file from step before.
4. Ship text file and script together with standard perl distribution to challenger. Unpack and install distribution, fetch file from website. YES!!!

;-)

BTW, CPAN is in a way something like that what you request, with the CPAN shell acting as decompressor, and the "install module" input as the compressed content.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com