On my FreeBSD 8.2, perl 5.12.2, it was terminated saying "killed :9". top command shows memory growing and growing.

#create test 48kb gz
perl -e 'print ("xxxxx" x 100000000) '|gzip  > test.gz
[download]

#perl 
$Archive::Extract::PREFER_BIN = 1;
$ae = Archive::Extract->new( archive => 'test.gz' );
$ae->extract( to => 'test.txt');
print "end\n";
[download]

I guess you already know this, but when PREFFER_BIN is not set, Archive::Extract says "You do not have 'Compress::Zlib' installed - Please install it as soon as possible. at tmp.pl line 10". With Compress::Zlib, you go to "_gunzip_cz" instead of "_gunzip_bin". _gunzip_cz works fine with Compress::Zlib.

As you pointed out, without Compress::Zlib, it calls _gunzip_bin and executes "/usr/bin/gzip -cdf /tmp/test.gz" through IPC::Cmd' run function and put the stdout to $buffer.

I am not sure what is the reason to catch results through STDOUT. Does redirection like

my $cmd = [ $self->bin_gzip, '-cdf', $self->archive ,'>' ,$self->_gunz
+ip_to ];
[download]

have some trouble when you think of portability, I wonder?