So here is the code that I tried:

use strict;
use Archive::Tar;
my $filename = "filename.tar.gz";
Archive::Tar->extract_archive($filename);
[download]

As near as I can tell it just loaded (tried) into memory so it could then write out, but it ran out of memory before then. I think what this comment means to say is that if your tar file includes multiple files, it will not read them all into memory. Instead it will load a single file into memory, then write it out, then read the next file into memory, then write it out, etc.

Where I am looking to try and do something like process binary chunk write it to file, remove binary chunk from memory, repeat until done. As far as I can tell this pm, does not do that... If anyone knows better, I would really appreciate it.

Otherwise I am checking out really thin un-tar programs, like the ones mentioned in the comments to this post that I can package with my program, and just make a system call to them to handle the untar...

If anyone has any other idea, I would love to hear them. I am stuck with this file compression since it is the output of the machine.