Before I open a ticket for Archive::Extract, I was wondering if anyone could double-check me.

When using Archive::Extract to extract large gzipped files (.gz), I'm receiving an "Out of Memory" error. (Note: I'm setting $Archive::Extract::PREFER_BIN to 1 to prefer using system binaries.)

Example code:

use Archive::Extract;
$Archive::Extract::PREFER_BIN = 1;
my $ae = Archive::Extract->new( archive => 'big.txt.gz' );
$ae->extract( to => 'big.txt');
[download]

Looking at the module, it looks as if it runs gzip with '-c' (write to STDOUT) and captures the output in a buffer. The buffer is then written to a filehandle. Here's where I need the double-check.

sub _gunzip_bin {
    my $self = shift;

    ### check for /bin/gzip -- we need it ###
    unless( $self->bin_gzip ) {
        $self->_error(loc("No '%1' program found", '/bin/gzip'));
        return METHOD_NA;
    }

    my $fh = FileHandle->new('>'. $self->_gunzip_to) or
        return $self->_error(loc("Could not open '%1' for writing: %2"
+,
                            $self->_gunzip_to, $! ));

    my $cmd = [ $self->bin_gzip, '-cdf', $self->archive ];

    my $buffer;
    unless( scalar run( command => $cmd,
                        verbose => $DEBUG,
                        buffer  => \$buffer )
    ) {
        return $self->_error(loc("Unable to gunzip '%1': %2",
                                    $self->archive, $buffer));
    }

    ### no buffers available?
    if( !IPC::Cmd->can_capture_buffer and !$buffer ) {
        $self->_error( $self->_no_buffer_content( $self->archive ) );
    }

    $self->_print($fh, $buffer) if defined $buffer;

    close $fh;

    ### set what files where extract, and where they went ###
    $self->files( [$self->_gunzip_to] );
    $self->extract_path( File::Spec->rel2abs(cwd()) );

    return 1;
}
[download]

As far as I can tell, it's not happening with the other methods of compression. It looks like gzipped files are the only ones handled this way.

Thank you!
Casey