A short tutorial about CPAN

How do I install the required Devel::Symdump module?

• PerlPad (0.2) requires the Perl module Devel::Symdump. This module does not ship with the Perl installation of Mac OS X. It is available on CPAN, the public repository of Perl modules.
• There are two ways to install CPAN modules. The following steps are not specific for Devel::Symdump, but apply to all modules on CPAN.
• The easiest method is to use the CPAN client application (which is already included in your Perl distribution). You need to run it as a system administrator because it needs to add files to your system's Perl installation.
  1. Open a terminal shell window and type 'sudo cpan'. This should start the CPAN client and present you with a new command prompt.
  2. Type 'install Devel::Symdump'. This should automatically download and install the module.

• Sometimes the CPAN client fails to install the module, for example because it cannot download the module through your firewall. Sometimes it also does strange things, like trying to download a complete new version of Perl. In this case, you might want to install the module manually. That is not difficult, either: get the module from CPAN (in this case from here), extract the file, open a terminal window, change the working directory to the extracted file, and run the following four commands (as outlined in the module's README file, which you are of course encouraged to peruse):

  1. 'perl Makefile.pl'
  2. 'make'
  3. 'make test'
  4. 'sudo make install'