Quite probably because @filename is going to be empty since the glob operator isn't going to produce anything unless files of matching names already exist in the current working directory. Of course one might have used the debugger and/or some diagnostic print statements before posting to determine this for themselves.

Here's an adapted version of code you can find in the afore-mentioned review article, using some of the info from your code snippet:

use Archive::Tar;

my $tar = Archive::Tar->new( "test.tar" );

# get a list of Archive::Tar::File objects whose file names match "lr3
+*":

my @files = grep { $_->name =~ /^lr3/ } $tar->get_files;

for my $file ( @files ) {
    $tar->extract_file( $file );  # this method works on A::T::F objec
+ts
}
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