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How can I install or upgrade a CPAN module that is in the latest Perl, without installing the new Perl?

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How do I install CPAN modules?

To install Perl modules using CPAN, you need to use the cpan command-line utility. You can either run cpan with arguments from the command-line interface, for example, to install a module (e.g Geo::IP) use the -i flag as shown.


I'd like to install a Perl module (in this case, FindBin), but since it is included in the Perl 5.10.1 distribution, cpan wants to install Perl 5.10 for me. Is there a way of installing just the module via cpan?

The only option that I can see is installing directly from source, which seems a bit crude as there is no separate package (for example, Makefile.PL, etc.), just the bare .pm file.

Since this is a small module that only has the one file, it's doable in this case, but what if I wanted to install a much larger package?

EDIT: This is somewhat aside from the original question, but speaks to the general issue of modules being packaged up with Perl distributions: I discovered that the "standalone" FindBin (version 1.49) had a syntactic error, so I retrieved version 1.50 out of the Perl 5.10.1 distribution... However since the module is now listed on CPAN as part of Perl 5.10, I am unable to find the CHANGES file describing what was changed/fixed in this delta. Is it reasonable that I should have to go into the developer repository to pull out this information?)


EDIT 2. Okay, here's a better example. On Perl 5.8.8 I have version 1.04 of Carp. However, I see that Perl 5.10.1 comes packaged with version 1.11. Is there a way of getting CPAN to install the latest version of Carp for me without dragging in all of Perl 5.10.1? I can't even find a link to the Carp module on CPAN except to the perl 5.10.1 installation.