Chapter 1

Recent versions of Perl come with a module called CPAN,

7

 which as you might 

have guessed is used to access the contents of CPAN. The CPAN module makes 

installing CPAN modules incredibly easy. It downloads modules from CPAN and 

automatically follows their dependencies, saving you a lot of work (which you'll 

learn all about in the upcoming section,  The Hard Way ).

To get started with the CPAN module, enter the following command:

# perl  MCPAN  e shell

If you're using a UNIX system and want to install modules system wide, you'll have 

to run this command as the root user. It is possible to use the CPAN module as a 

normal user, but you won't be able to install modules into the system.

The first time you run this command the CPAN module will ask you a series 

of questions:

# perl  MCPAN  e shell

CPAN is the world wide archive of perl resources. It consists of about

100 sites that all replicate the same contents all around the globe.

Many countries have at least one CPAN site already. The resources

found on CPAN are easily accessible with the CPAN.pm module. If you

want to use CPAN.pm, you have to configure it properly.

If you do not want to enter a dialog now, you can answer  no  to this

question and I ll try to autoconfigure. (Note: you can revisit this

dialog anytime later by typing  o conf init  at the cpan prompt.)

Are you ready for manual configuration? [yes]

Each question has a default answer in square brackets. In most cases the default 

will be correct and you can just press Enter to continue. One important question to 

look for is this one, about following prerequisites:

The CPAN module can detect when a module that which you are trying to

build depends on prerequisites. If this happens, it can build the

prerequisites for you automatically ( follow ), ask you for

confirmation ( ask ), or just ignore them ( ignore ). Please set your

policy to one of the three values.

Policy on building prerequisites (follow, ask or ignore)? [ask]

7. Written and maintained by Andreas Koenig

14