Somebody asked the question about how to run a cron job to determine which perl modules need updates a few days back. I'd intended to answer it, but apparently it made it to my bitbucket first...

You'll have to have CPAN configured first. But from the CPAN.pm documentation (http://search.cpan.org/~andk/CPAN-1.76/lib/CPAN.pm#Programmer's_interface):

# list all installed modules that have newer version on CPAN
perl -e 'use CPAN; CPAN::Shell->r;'

Which is nice from the command-line, but prints a lot of extraneous info.

So here's the script they list that you could save off and run via a cron job:

# list all modules on my disk that have newer versions on CPAN
for $mod (CPAN::Shell->expand("Module","/./")){
    next unless $mod->inst_file;
    next if $mod->uptodate;
    printf "Module %s is installed as %s, could be updated to %s from CPAN\n",
           $mod->id, $mod->inst_version, $mod->cpan_version;
}

And here's how you could update everything to the current recommendations from the command-line:

# install everything that is outdated on my disk:
perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->install(CPAN::Shell->r)'

cheers,

Garrett

--
Garrett Goebel
IS Development Specialist

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