Given a directory structure which looks something like this (which I've been using for testing):

fred
fred/asd
fred/derf
fred/qwe
fred/zxc
fred/derf/fgh
fred/derf/rty
fred/derf/fgh/vbn
[download]

I'm looking for a way to implement the following command in Perl:

$ tar zcvf fred.tar.gz fred
[download]

I thought the builtin Archive::Tar module was possibly the way to go. I can get this to achieve what I want but it's horribly clunky:

use Archive::Tar;
my $tar = Archive::Tar::->new();
$tar->add_files(glob "fred fred/* fred/*/* fred/*/*/*");
$tar->write("fred.tar.gz", COMPRESS_GZIP);
[download]

This has additional problems in that the directory structure could be deeper and hidden files (starting with '.') are not captured by any of those glob patterns.

I tried using "fred" and "fred/" as the sole arguments to add_files() but they only pick up the top-level directory, not the rest of the directory structure. I can't see an add_directory() (or similarly named) method. I also tried with the create_archive() class method but had a similar lack of success.

I've also had a hunt around various core and CPAN modules in the Archive:: and IO:: namespaces: none seemed to do what I want.

I could write a recursive routine to capture the entire directory into an array (for add_files(@filenamelist)). That would be my fallback plan but I was hoping there might be a more elegant (less code) way of doing this.

Any ideas on how I might achieve what I want with either Archive::Tar, or some other module, would be appreciated.