How can I de-install a Perl module installed via `cpan`?

Question

1. Install App::cpanminus from CPAN (use: cpan App::cpanminus for this).
2. Type cpanm --uninstall Module::Name (note the "m") to uninstall the module with cpanminus.

This should work.

You can't. There isn't a feature in my CPAN client to do such a thing. We were talking about how we might do something like that at this weekend's Perl QA Workshop, but it's generally hard for all the reasons that Ether mentioned.

As a general rule, there is not a specific 'uninstall' mechanism that comes with CPAN modules. But you might try make uninstall in the original directory the module unpacked into (this is often under /root/.cpan or ~/.cpan), as some packages do contain this directive in their install script. (However, since you've installed modules into a local (non-root) library directory, you also have the option of blowing away this entire directory and reinstalling everything else that you want to keep.)

A lot of the time you can simply get away with removing the A/B.pm file (for the A::B module) from your perllib -- that will at least render the module unusable. Most modules also contain a list of files to be installed (called a "manifest"), so if you can find that, you'll know which files you can delete.

However, none of these approaches will address any modules that were installed as dependencies. There's no good (automated) way of knowing if something else is dependent on that module, so you'll have to uninstall it manually as well once you're sure.

The difficulty in uninstalling modules is one reason why many Perl developers are moving towards using a revision control system to keep track of installations -- e.g. see the article by brian d foy as a supplement to his upcoming book that discusses using git for package management.

There are scripts on CPAN which attempt to uninstall modules:

• pm-uninstall
• perlrocks

ExtUtils::Packlist shows sample module removing code, modrm.

Update 2013: This code is obsolescent. Upvote bsb's late-coming answer instead.

---

I don't need to uninstall modules often, but the .packlist file based approach has never failed me so far.

use 5.010;
use ExtUtils::Installed qw();
use ExtUtils::Packlist qw();

die "Usage: $0 Module::Name Module::Name\n" unless @ARGV;

for my $mod (@ARGV) {
    my $inst = ExtUtils::Installed->new;

    foreach my $item (sort($inst->files($mod))) {
        say "removing $item";
        unlink $item or warn "could not remove $item: $!\n";
    }

    my $packfile = $inst->packlist($mod)->packlist_file;
    print "removing $packfile\n";
    unlink $packfile or warn "could not remove $packfile: $!\n";
}