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

To walk through the @INC directory trees without using an external program like ls(1), one could use the File::Find::Rule module, which has a nice declarative interface.

Also, you want to filter out duplicates in case previous Perl versions contain the same modules. The code to do this looks like:

#! /usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find::Rule;

my %seen;
for my $path (@INC) {
    for my $file (File::Find::Rule->name('*.pm')->in($path)) {
        my $module = substr($file, length($path)+1);
        $module =~ s/.pm$//;
        $module =~ s{[\\/]}{::}g;
        print $module unless $seen{$module}++;
    }
}

At the end of the run, you also have all your module names as keys in the %seen hash. The code could be adapted to save the canonical filename (given in $file) as the value of the key instead of a count of times seen.