ActivePerl PPM

Chapter 1 - CPAN
by?Sam Tregar?
Apress ? 2002
Companion Web Site

If you are using Perl on a Microsoft Windows system, there's a pretty good chance you are using ActiveState's^[10] ActivePerl distribution. ActivePerl is also available for Linux and Solaris. If you're using ActivePerl, then you have a utility called PPM that can potentially make module installation even easier than using the CPAN module. Specifically, PPM will install binary distributions from the PPM repository at ActiveState (and elsewhere). This makes installing C-based modules possible on machines without C compilers. It also alleviates the need to install make, nmake, or dmake as previously described.

The downside is that the ActiveState PPM repository isn't CPAN. It contains many of the most popular CPAN modules, but many are missing. Even worse, the modules that are present are often out-of-date compared to the CPAN versions.

Using PPM is a lot like using the CPAN module's shell. To get started, use this command in your system's shell:

 ppm 

Now you'll be presented with a PPM prompt. The most common command is install, which allows you to install modules. This command will install a (probably out-of-date) version of my HTML::Template module:

 install HTML::Template 

To learn more about PPM, you can use the online help facility in the PPM shell with the help command.

^[10]See http://www.activestate.com.