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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
[...]
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::* Classes: Author, Bundle, Module, Distribution
Namespace Class
words containing a "/" (slash) Distribution
words starting with Bundle:: Bundle
everything else Module or Author
Modules know their associated Distribution objects. They always refer to the most recent official release. Developers may mark their releases as unstable development versions (by inserting an underbar into the visible version number), so not always is the default distribution for a given module the really hottest and newest. If a module Foo circulates on CPAN in both version 1.23 and 1.23_90, CPAN.pm offers a convenient way to install version 1.23 by saying
install Foo
This would install the complete distribution file (say BAR/Foo-1.23.tar.gz) with all accompanying material in there. But if you would like to install version 1.23_90, you need to know where the distribution file resides on CPAN relative to the authors/id/ directory. If the author is BAR, this might be BAR/Foo-1.23_90.tar.gz, so you would have to say
install BAR/Foo-1.23_90.tar.gz
The first example will be driven by an object of the class CPAN::Module, the second by an object of class CPAN::Distribution.
CPAN::Shell->install(...)) and as functions in the calling package (install(...)).
There's currently only one class that has a stable interface, CPAN::Shell.
All commands that are available in the CPAN shell are methods of the class
CPAN::Shell. Each of the commands that produce listings of modules (r, autobundle, u) returns a list of the IDs of all modules within the list.
CPAN::Shell->expand("Module",@things) method. Expand returns a list of CPAN::Module objects according to the @things arguments given. In scalar context it only returns the first element of the
list.
# install everything that is outdated on my disk:
perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->install(CPAN::Shell->r)'
# install my favorite programs if necessary:
for $mod (qw(Net::FTP MD5 Data::Dumper)){
my $obj = CPAN::Shell->expand('Module',$mod);
$obj->install;
}
# list all modules on my disk that have no VERSION number
for $mod (CPAN::Shell->expand("Module","/./")){
next unless $mod->inst_file;
# MakeMaker convention for undefined $VERSION:
next unless $mod->inst_version eq "undef";
print "No VERSION in ", $mod->id, "\n";
}
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.
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:
urllist parameter of the configuration table contains a list of URLs that are to be
used for downloading. If the list contains any
file URLs, CPAN always tries to get files from there first. This feature is
disabled for index files. So the recommendation for the owner of a CD-ROM
with CPAN contents is: include your local, possibly outdated CD-ROM as a file URL at the end of urllist, e.g.
o conf urllist push file://localhost/CDROM/CPAN
CPAN.pm will then fetch the index files from one of the CPAN sites that come at the beginning of urllist. It will later check for each module if there is a local copy of the most recent version.
Future development should be directed towards a better integration of the other parts.
perl(1), CPAN::Nox(3)