Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Locating Modules

If you start from the modules directory on CPAN, you’ll see that the modules are categorized into three subdirectories:

by-authors       Modules by author's registered CPAN name
by-category      Modules by subject matter (see below)
by-module        Modules by namespace (i.e., MIME)

If you know what module you want, you can go directly to it by clicking on the by-module entry. If you are looking for a module in a particular category, you can find it in the by-category subdirectory. If you know the author, click on by-author. However, if you aren’t familiar with the categories and want to find a module that performs a certain task, you might want to get the file 00modlist.long.html, also in the modules directory. This file is the “Perl 5 Modules List.” It contains a list of all the modules, by category, with a brief description of the purpose of each module and a link to the author’s CPAN directory for downloading.

Here is a list of the Perl Module categories, plus two for modules that don’t fit anywhere else:

02_Perl_Core_Modules 03_Development_Support 04_Operating_System_Interfaces 05_Networking_Devices_IPC 06_Data_Type_Utilities 07_Database_Interface 08_User_Interfaces 09_Language_Interfaces 10_File_Names_Systems_Locking 11_String_Lang_Text_Proc 12_Opt_Arg_Param_Proc 13_Internationalization_Locale 14_Security_and_Encryption 15_World_Wide_Web_HTML_HTTP_CGI 16_Server_and_Daemon_Utilities 17_Archiving_and_Compression 18_Images_Pixmaps_Bitmaps 19_Mail_and_Usenet_News 20_Control_Flow_Utilities ...