Sometimes it is necessary to install other modules into the Perl environment. Luckily there is a great repository of modules known as CPAN (The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). This lets you install modules to help with encryption, XML,YAML, and many other things. There are a few ways to install a package and here are the ones that I use the most.
Using the CPAN shell:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
This will open a command prompt that will let you search for CPAN modules with:
i /PACKAGENAME/
or install a new module:
install /DateTime/
The nice thing about installing with CPAN is that it will look for the dependencies and suggest installing them before the module you requested.
NOTE:This can take some time and your dependencies could have dependencies.
The other method I use is to skip the CPAN prompt and just directly execute the install of the module:
perl -MCPAN -e 'install DateTime'
This is just the most basic of usage, and there is probably a lot more you can do, but I have not had to use much more than this.
Tags: perl, Programming, scripting