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

Quick and dirty:

$ perl -MXML::Simple -e 1

Answer 2

For example, to check if the DBI module is installed or not, use

perl -e 'use DBI;'

You will see error if not installed. (from http://www.linuxask.com)

Answer 3

You can check for a module's installation path by:

perldoc -l XML::Simple

The problem with your one-liner is that, it is not recursively traversing directories/sub-directories. Hence, you get only pragmatic module names as output.

Answer 4

while (<@INC>)

This joins the paths in @INC together in a string, separated by spaces, then calls glob() on the string, which then iterates through the space-separated components (unless there are file-globbing meta-characters.)

This doesn't work so well if there are paths in @INC containing spaces, \, [], {}, *, ?, or ~, and there seems to be no reason to avoid the safe alternative:

for (@INC)

Answer 5

What you're doing there is not recursing into directories. It is only listing the modules in the root directory of the @INC directory.

The module XML::Simple will live in one of the @INC paths under XML/Simple.pm.

What he said above to find specific modules.

CPAN explains how to find all modules here, see How to find installed modules.

Answer 6

If you want to quickly check if a module is installed (at least on Unix systems, with Bash as shell), add this to your .bashrc file:

alias modver="perl -e\"eval qq{use \\\$ARGV[0];\\\\\\\$v=\\\\\\\$\\\${ARGV[0]}::VERSION;};\ print\\\$@?qq{No module found\\n}:\\\$v?qq{Version \\\$v\\n}:qq{Found.\\n};\"\$1"

Then you can:

=> modver XML::Simple
No module found

=> modver DBI
Version 1.607