CPAN Minus Makes Managing Perl Modules Easier

April 29, 2011
By Joe Brockmeier

It's not easy cracking an oyster open to get to the Perl, but Perl modules are often hard to avoid, and the standard CPAN certainly complicates things further. CPAN Minus makes managing them easier, as ServerWatch explains.

Perl may not be the hot topic, but that doesn't mean that admins don't need to worry about Perl modules. However, the standard CPAN shell can sometimes be a bit much to manage. If that's the case, consider switching to CPAN Minus.

What's CPAN Minus (or "cpanm" if you prefer the caps-challenged version) for? Installing CPAN modules, period. It can get, unpack, build, and install Perl modules from CPAN -- but it can't do any of the other stuff the CPAN shell can do. It's meant to require zero configuration, and it runs as a stand-alone application.

You can get cpanm a couple of ways -- some distros may already package it. If not, you can follow the installation instructions or grab it from Github and install it that way.

Once you've installed cpanm, you can start installing modules right away. To install a module, simply run cpanm ModuleName or cpanm--sudo ModuleName if you want to install the module system-wide and aren't logged in as root.

Read the rest of "Simplify Perl Module Management With CPAN Minus" on ServerWatch

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