How do I get a list of installed CPAN modules?

Question

Aside from trying

perldoc 

individually for any CPAN module that takes my fancy or going through the file system and loo

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).