CPAN Minus
The facts below are what the maker publishes about CPAN Minus, checked and dated. Our editors have not written about it yet.
Plans and prices
From CPAN Minus's own pricing page, checked 12 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| cpanminus | Free | get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN |
The facts
Each one read from CPAN Minus's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- CPAN lookup
- It queries the CPAN Meta DB and falls back to MetaCPAN's search API for module lookup.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Dependencies
- The documentation lists Perl 5.8.1 or later, tar or Archive::Tar, make, and a C compiler when building XS modules.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Dependency resolution
- Yeschecked 21 Sep 2026
- Installation
- The documentation describes installation through system package managers, installation into system or local Perl, and downloading a standalone executable.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Install location
- It installs modules to the location configured by ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build, and can set up a local-lib compatible path under the home directory when needed.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Limit
- The documentation says cpanminus may have issues with distributions whose tests require STDIN or whose build scripts prompt for input despite `PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT`.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Maintainer
- MetaCPAN lists Tatsuhiko Miyagawa as the author and release uploader.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Not included
- The documentation says cpanminus does not itself report CPAN tester results, build RPM packages, list outdated modules, show upgrade changes, or patch modules with distroprefs.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Offline installation
- Yeschecked 21 Sep 2026
- Package availability
- The documentation names Debian packages, RPMs, FreeBSD ports, and packages for other operating systems.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Package formats
- Perl modules,CPAN distributions,tar.gz archiveschecked 21 Sep 2026
- Privacy detail
- The documentation says cpanm sends local Perl versions in its User-Agent by default when querying those API hosts, and that this can be disabled with `--no-report-perl-version`.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Purpose
- cpanminus is a script to get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Runtime
- The documentation says it requires only 10MB of RAM when running.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Setup
- The documentation says it is dependency free, can bootstrap itself, requires zero configuration, and stands alone.checked 12 Oct 2026
- Usage
- The documented basic invocation is `cpanm Module`.checked 12 Oct 2026
Where it runs
- Supported platforms
- Perl 5.8.1 or laterchecked 21 Sep 2026
