Installing and using CPAN.pm

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Author: JT Smith

Sensei writes “This document assumes that you:
know basic Unix/Linux commands, know how to use a Unix/Linux text editor, know how to read Unix/Linux path names, and know basic Perl.

Why install CPAN?

Quite simply CPAN.pm takes care of those piddling details which can make perl module installation so painful – it will find, ftp, decompress, install and make any module you want, as well as checking you also have any modules further up the chain of inheritance, stopping runtime errors on scripts which are trying to USE modules which themselves USE modules that you didn’t know you needed to install (Net::FTP is a good example of this fish hook behaviour as it basically inherits from Net::cmd, and without that you get nothing but a nice cascade display).

Check it out at Linuxnewbie.org.