As Zaxo said, there seems to be a confussion on $ENV{PATH} and $ENV{PWD}. The full path solution will work for gzip, but in the interest of over-answering questions so we all better understand Perl, I would also like to add a comment on actually changing directory in Perl :

Getting Current Directory: You can use the Cwd module to get a portable way of getting the current directory. It works like this :

    use Cwd;
    $dir1 = cwd();
    $dir2 = getcwd();  # C version of cwd()
    $dir3 = fastcwd(); # less stable , faster C version
[download]

Setting Current Directory: Setting the current directory is not usually needed as complete paths would be prefered. In the event that a program being started does need a specific current directory, or if chroot is being used, it can be done as follows :

    my $dir = '/tmp';
    chdir($dir) || die "Failed to cd : $!\n";
[download]

Hope that helps soemone.

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OH, a sarcasm detector, that’s really useful