Stumbling Upon CPAN

I don’t know Perl. I don’t want to know Perl, because I don’t need to know Perl to do what matters in my life. Still, I can’t get done things I need to do without the existence of Perl. For example, I rather like that utility called clive. This poor little laptop just gets run into the ground when I run any Flash, so I simply don’t install it. Instead, I extract the video if it’s all that important and watch it some other way.

The problem is, CentOS is lacking some of the Perl modules to make Clive work properly. Reading the instructions with the Clive source package, I discovered there is a command called cpan which can solve this little problem.

When run the first time, cpan will do some setup and config, then will start adding some basic Perl modules needed to compile others. Once that’s done, it will attempt to install any requested modules using the following pattern:

cpan install Some::Module

I managed to get all the dependencies of Clive worked out and it does just fine. I may never have any reason to run the cpan command again, but it’s nice to know it’s there.