How can I check if a Perl module is installed on my system from the command line?

Question

I tried to check if XML::Simple is installed in my system or not.

perl -e \'while (<@INC>) { while (<$_/*.pm>) { print \"$_\\n\"; } }\'
         


        

Answer 1

Bravo for @user80168's solution (I'm still counting \'s !) but to avoid all the escaping involved with aliases and shells:

%~/ cat ~/bin/perlmod
perl -le'eval qq{require $ARGV[0]; } 
    ? print ( "Found $ARGV[0] Version: ", eval "$ARGV[0]->VERSION" ) 
    : print "Not installed" ' $1

works reasonably well.

Here might be the simplest and most "modern" approach, using Module::Runtime:

perl -MModule::Runtime=use_module -E '
     say "$ARGV[0] ", use_module($ARGV[0])->VERSION' DBI

This will give a useful error if the module is not installed.

Using -MModule::Runtime requires it to be installed (it is not a core module).