[majewsky]

Would probably be much more efficient to use /dev/zero:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/stdout bs=1M count=1024 | gzip > zipbomb.gz

However, you're restricted to NUL bytes there. However, you can vastly improve your original Perl script by writing more chars at a time:

  perl -e "my \$x = ('0' x 1000000); print \$x for (1..1000)" | gzip > zipbomb.gz

That runs about as fast as the dd variant on my system, and about 10 times faster than your original formulation.

[setr]

yes 0 | head -n 1000000000 | gzip > zipbomb.gz

?