prescott2006 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Yes - see the pipe form of open. You need the bunzip2 executable installed for that:
my $cmd = sprintf 'bunzip2 -cd "%s"', $filename; open my $fh, "$cmd |" or die "Couldn't launch [$cmd]: $!"; binmode $fh; print while <$fh>; [download]
Update: Fixed missing filename argument, spotted by AnomalousMonk