Check out the Compress::Zlib perl module. It lets you read and write .gz files directly w/o the need for a pipe (or spawning a separate gzip process).

$outlog=gzopen("somefile.gz","a");
$outlog->gzwrite("some data\n");
$outlog->gzclose();
[download]

The code for reading is very similar.

Les Howard
www.lesandchris.com
Author of Net::Syslog and Number::Spell