Another clue in the documentation supporting the theory that Archive::Tar will support extracting absolute paths is the documentation for the Archive::Tar->extract_archive($file, $compressed) function:

Extracts the contents of the tar file. The first argument can either be the name of the tar file to create or a reference to an open file handle (e.g. a GLOB reference). All relative paths in the tar file will be created underneath the current working directory.

That implies that absolute paths have a different behavior--perhaps using the absolute path. You ought to give it a try and report back for posterity.

...roboticus

Who really ought to try Archive::Tar sometime...