What is the best way to gunzip files with Perl?

Question

Is there a faster solution than my actual \'zcat\' solution to gunzip files with Perl?

A little benchmark:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;         


        

Answer 1

And I also don't understand why while (<$z>) is slower than while (my $line = $z->getline())...

Because $z is a self tied object, tied objects are notoriously slow, and <$z> uses the tied object interface to call getline() rather than directly calling the method.

Also you can try PerlIO-gzip but I suspect it won't be any/much faster than the other module.