perl -MCPAN -e shell;
Batch mode:
use CPAN;
autobundle, clean, install, make, recompile, test
Modules are fetched from one or more of the mirrored CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) sites and unpacked in a dedicated directory.
The CPAN module also supports the concept of named and versioned 'bundles' of modules. Bundles simplify the handling of sets of related modules. See BUNDLES below.
The package contains a session manager and a cache manager. There is no status retained between sessions. The session manager keeps track of what has been fetched, built and installed in the current session. The cache manager keeps track of the disk space occupied by the make processes and deletes excess space according to a simple FIFO mechanism.
All methods provided are accessible in a programmer style and in an interactive shell style.
perl -MCPAN -e shell
which puts you into a readline interface. You will have most fun if you install Term::ReadKey and Term::ReadLine to enjoy both history and completion.
Once you are on the command line, type 'h' and the rest should be self-explanatory.
The most common uses of the interactive modes are
a, b, d, and m
for each of the four categories and another, i for any of the mentioned four. Each of the four entities is implemented as
a class with slightly differing methods for displaying an object.
Arguments you pass to these commands are either strings matching exact the identification string of an object or regular expressions that are then matched case-insensitively against various attributes of the objects. The parser recognizes a regualar expression only if you enclose it between two slashes.
The principle is that the number of found objects influences how an item is displayed. If the search finds one item, we display the result of object->as_string, but if we find more than one, we display each as object->as_glimpse. E.g.
cpan> a ANDK
Author id = ANDK
EMAIL a.koenig@franz.ww.TU-Berlin.DE
FULLNAME Andreas König
cpan> a /andk/
Author id = ANDK
EMAIL a.koenig@franz.ww.TU-Berlin.DE
FULLNAME Andreas König
cpan> a /and.*rt/
Author ANDYD (Andy Dougherty)
Author MERLYN (Randal L. Schwartz)
Any make, test, and readme are run unconditionally.
A
install <distribution_file>
also is run unconditionally. But for
install <module>
CPAN checks if an install is actually needed for it and prints Foo up to date in case the module doesn&39;t need to be updated.
CPAN also keeps track of what it has done within the
current session and doesn&39;t try to build a package a second time regardless if it succeeded or not.
The force command takes as first argument the method to invoke (currently: make,
test, or install) and executes the command from scratch.
Example:
cpan> install OpenGL
OpenGL is up to date.
cpan> force install OpenGL
Running make
OpenGL-0.4/
OpenGL-0.4/COPYRIGHT
[...]
readme displays the
README of the associated distribution file. Look gets and untars (if not yet done) the distribution file, changes to the
appropriate directory and opens a subshell process in that directory.
autobundle writes a bundle file into the
$CPAN::Config->{cpan_home}/Bundle directory. The file contains a list of all modules that are both available from
CPAN and currently installed within
@INC. The name of the bundle file is based on the current date and a counter.
recompile is a very special command in that it takes no argument and runs the make/test/install cycle with brute force over all installed dynamically loadable extensions (aka
XS modules) with 'force' in effect. Primary purpose of this command is to finish a network installation. Imagine, you have a common source tree for two different architectures. You decide to do a completely independent fresh installation. You start on one architecture with the help of a Bundle file produced earlier.
CPAN installs the whole Bundle for you, but when you try to repeat the job on the second architecture,
CPAN responds with a
"Foo up to date" message for all modules. So you will be glad to run recompile in the second
architecture and you&39;re done.
Another popular use for recompile is to act as a rescue in case your perl breaks binary compatibility. If one of the modules that
CPAN uses is in turn depending on binary compatibility (so you cannot run
CPAN commands), then you should try the CPAN::Nox module for recovery.
CPAN::Shell->install) and as functions in the calling package (install). The programmer&39;s interface has beta status. Do not heavily rely on it, changes may still
be necessary.
build_dir as soon as the size of all directories there gets bigger than $CPAN::Config->{build_cache} (in
MB). The contents of this cache may be used for later re-installations that you intend to do manually, but will never be trusted by
CPAN itself. This is due to the fact that the user might use these directories for building modules on different architectures.
There is another directory ($CPAN::Config->{keep_source_where}) where the original distribution files are kept. This directory is not covered by the cache manager and must be controlled by the user. If you choose to have the same directory as build_dir and as keep_source_where directory, then your sources will be deleted with the same fifo mechanism.
It starts like a perl module with a package declaration and a
$VERSION variable. After that the pod section looks like any
other pod with the only difference, that one special pod section exists starting with (verbatim):
=head1 CONTENTS
In this pod section each line obeys the format
Module_Name [Version_String] [- optional text]
The only required part is the first field, the name of a module (eg. Foo::Bar, ie. not the name of the distribution file). The rest of the line is optional. The comment part is delimited by a dash just as in the man page header.
The distribution of a bundle should follow the same convention as other distributions.
Bundles are treated specially in the
CPAN package. If you say 'install Bundle::Tkkit' (assuming such a bundle exists),
CPAN will install all the modules in the
CONTENTS section of the pod. You can install your own Bundles locally by placing a conformant Bundle file somewhere into your @INC path. The autobundle command which is available in the shell interface does that for you by including all currently installed modules in a snapshot bundle file.
There is a meaningless Bundle::Demo available on CPAN. Try to install it, it usually does no harm, just demonstrates what the Bundle interface looks like.
ftp:.
If you have neither Net::FTP nor LWP, there is a fallback mechanism implemented for an external ftp command or for an external lynx command.
This module presumes that all packages on CPAN
$VERSION variable in an easy to parse manner.
This prerequisite can hardly be relaxed because it consumes by far too much
memory to load all packages into the running program just to determine the
$VERSION variable . Currently all programs that are dealing
with version use something like this
perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker -le \
'print MM->parse_version($ARGV[0])' filename
If you are author of a package and wonder if your $VERSION can
be parsed, please try the above method.
In interactive mode you can try ``o debug'' which will list options for debugging the various parts of the package. The output may not be very useful for you as it's just a byproduct of my own testing, but if you have an idea which part of the package may have a bug, it's sometimes worth to give it a try and send me more specific output. You should know that ``o debug'' has built-in completion support.
use or require statements.
Currently the following keys in the hash reference $CPAN::Config are defined:
build_cache size of cache for directories to build modules
build_dir locally accessible directory to build modules
index_expire after how many days refetch index files
cpan_home local directory reserved for this package
gzip location of external program gzip
inactivity_timeout breaks interactive Makefile.PLs after that
many seconds inactivity. Set to 0 to never break.
inhibit_startup_message
if true, does not print the startup message
keep_source keep the source in a local directory?
keep_source_where where keep the source (if we do)
make location of external program make
make_arg arguments that should always be passed to 'make'
make_install_arg same as make_arg for 'make install'
makepl_arg arguments passed to 'perl Makefile.PL'
pager location of external program more (or any pager)
tar location of external program tar
unzip location of external program unzip
urllist arrayref to nearby CPAN sites (or equivalent locations)
You can set and query each of these options interactively in the cpan shell
with the command set defined within the o conf command:
Future development should be directed towards a better intergration of the other parts.
perl, CPAN::Nox(3)