Perl

Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is an interpreted procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall. Perl borrows features from C, shell scripting (sh), awk, sed, and (to a lesser extent) many other programming languages.

CPAN

CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is a collection of mirrored web sites that serve as a primary archive and distribution channel for Perl sources, distributions, documentation, scripts, and—especially—modules. It is commonly browsed with the search engine http://search.cpan.org/.

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There are currently over 7,000 modules available on CPAN, contributed by nearly 4,000 authors. Modules are available for a wide variety of tasks, including advanced mathematics, database connectivity, and networking. Essentially everything on CPAN is freely available; much of the software is licensed under either the Artistic License, the GPL, or both. Anyone can upload software to CPAN via PAUSE, the Perl Authors Upload Server.

Related Topics:
Artistic License - GPL

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Modules on CPAN can be downloaded and installed by hand. However, it is common for modules to depend on other modules, and following module dependencies by hand can be tedious. Both the CPAN.pm module (included in the Perl distribution) and the improved CPANPLUS module offers command lines installers that understand module dependencies; They can be configured to automatically download and install a module and, recursively, all modules that it requires.

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