Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

An Acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

cpan-plain.jpg

A vast collection of Free Perl software and documentation. If you're a Perl programmer, you're the kid and CPAN is the candy store. See the CPAN main page for more info and lots of sweets.

The quickest way to use CPAN to get modules is perl -MCPAN -eshell. However, many of the more popular modules are available in Debian and undoubtedly the other distributions as well, so you're better off using the package management if you can. In Debian at least, look for packages named lib<something>-perl. For example, the libdbd-pg-perl provides the DBD::Pg module from CPAN. RedHat merely calls this package DBD-Pg.

If you're looking for the GD::Graph::pie or GD::Graph::linespoints CPAN module on Debian, install libgd-graph-perl, libgd-perl, and libgd-text-perl.