Perl is a well-known programming language with long development history. The same long history provides the countless modules written in it, and distributed in various channels throughout the World Wide Web. As with most programming languages, if you implement something that you find useful, and maybe write it in a generic way, there are high chances others would find it useful too.
If you share your work with others, they don’t need to re-implement the wheel, they can spend time on other tools, thus making the community as a whole richer, and we have found the spirit of open source with a short walk. But as many people write perl modules, and perl runs on just about anything, it can be hard to find the module you are looking for, let alone build it in your environment. And that’s where cpan comes into play. CPAN itself is a large perl module repository, the cpan tool is a client that is able to fetch and compile needed modules to the local system.
In this tutorial we’ll install cpan on a RHEL 8 / CentOS 8, run the initial configuration, and install a module with this tool’s help.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install cpan
- How to run initial configuration
- How to install a perl module with cpan
