The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a collection of Perl modules and scripts distributed among a large number of mirror sites. CPAN is also the name of a perl module which provides an interface to install modules from CPAN. These notes document problems with CPAN on Mac OS X. See also the main Life with CPAN documentation.
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) includes Perl 5.8.6; to build modules from CPAN, install the XCode development package, then use the cpan command:
$ which cpan
/usr/bin/cpan
$ sudo -H cpan -i CGI::Application
Case Folding Filesystem
The default filesystem on Mac OS X (HFS+) folds case unlike traditional Unix filesystems; this can cause problems for Unix systems that assume File and file are two different things. For example, the LWP::UserAgent module installs /usr/bin/HEAD, which clobbers the existing /usr/bin/head utility. Solutions to this include not installing the HEAD and similar shortcuts, or ensuring these utilities are installed under /usr/local/bin instead. One way is to update the perl Makefile.PL arguments to install third-party utilities into a different directory than /usr/bin.
cpan> o conf makepl_arg "INSTALLBIN=/usr/local/bin INSTALLSCRIPT=/usr/local/bin"
cpan> o conf commit
Panther and /man
Perl 5.8.1 on Mac OS X 10.3 ships with broken settings that cause some modules installed from CPAN to install their manuals under the /man directory. This directory pollutes the root namespace, and is outside the places manuals are searched for by man(1).
To fix this problem, update the makepl_arg to set INSTALLSITEMAN1DIR and INSTALLSITEMAN3DIR manually.
$ grep makepl_arg /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/CPAN/Config.pm
'makepl_arg' => q[INSTALLSITEMAN1DIR=/usr/share/man/man1 ↵
INSTALLSITEMAN3DIR=/usr/share/man/man3],
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$Id: index.xml,v 1.6 2006/06/01 04:26:13 jmates Exp $