How do I get a list of installed CPAN modules?

Question

Aside from trying

perldoc <module name>

individually for any CPAN module that takes my fancy or going through the file system and looking at the directories I have no idea what modules we have installed.

What's the easiest way to just get a big list of every CPAN module installed? From the command line or otherwise.

Answer 1

It's worth noting that perldoc perllocal will only report on modules installed via CPAN. If someone installs modules manually, it won't find them. Also, if you have multiple people installing modules and the perllocal.pod is under source control, people might resolve conflicts incorrectly and corrupt the list (this has happened here at work, for example).

Regrettably, the solution appears to be walking through @INC with File::Find or something similar. However, that doesn't just find the modules, it also finds related modules in a distribution. For example, it would report TAP::Harness and TAP::Parser in addition to the actual distribution name of Test::Harness (assuming you have version 3 or above). You could potentially match them up with distribution names and discard those names which don't match, but then you might be discarding locally built and installed modules.

I believe brian d foy's backpan indexing work is supposed to have code to hand it at .pm file and it will attempt to infer the distribution, but even this fails at times because what's in a package is not necessarily installed (see Devel::Cover::Inc for an example).

Answer 2

This works for me

perl -e 'print join("\n",@INC,"")'

Answer 3

This is answered in the Perl FAQ, the answer which can be quickly found with perldoc -q installed. In short, it comes down to using ExtUtils::Installed or using File::Find, variants of both of which have been covered previously in this thread.

You can also find the FAQ entry "How do I find which modules are installed on my system?" in perlfaq3. You can see a list of all FAQ answers by looking in perlfaq

Answer 4

On Linux/Unix I use this simple command:

perl -e 'print qx/find $_ -name "*.pm"/ foreach ( @INC );' 

It scans all folder in @INC and looks for any *.pm file.

Answer 5

perldoc perllocal

Edit: There's a (little) more info about it in the CPAN FAQ

Answer 6

perl -MFile::Find=find -MFile::Spec::Functions -Tlwe 'find { wanted => sub { print canonpath $_ if /\.pm\z/ }, no_chdir => 1 }, @INC'