Through my own idiocy and some needless experiments with cpan I have made a mess of my Perl installation.

Is there a clean way to completely remove the stock Perl under -current as well all extra installed modules and then importantly make a completely clean Perl reinstallation?

Edit: Hmmm... looks like it is actually one Slackbuild in the d - series. So perhaps remove and reinstall this, delete all the .cpan directories and fish the installed Perl modules from /usr/local.....

Hoo Boy ...

Edit: Oops, this is not the thread I was think about !

But before you uninstall perl and the official Slackware Perl Modules, there may be a way to clean out the CPAN Modules you've installed ...

End Edit.

There are a zillion Qs in google about uninstalling CPAN Modules and it seems that there's nothing available to uninstall Perl Modules installed via the CPAN Shell ( it's a roach motel ).

And I've seen a few Qs here on the same subject and I've made a mess on each of my four previous Slackware-Based Development Systems so decided I needed to do something so that I can track and hopefully upgrade and remove CPAN Modules.

I've been using the SBo Packages: perl-CPANPLUS and perl-CPANPLUS-Dist-Slackware for a while now and the testing I've done indicate that I will be able to upgrade and remove the Packages I've installed this way.

There are a lot of dependencies for perl-CPANPLUS and perl-CPANPLUS-Dist-Slackware but as far as I can tell they will go a long way to avoid the messes I used to make on my systems when I used the CPAN shell ( not to mention the perl Modules that I had to download ; extract ; perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install ).

However, before I 'saw the light' I did install a number of CPAN Modules on my latest System via good ole: `perl -MCPAN -eshell`

Anyhow ... enough with the free advertising ... What do you see in your $HOME/.cpan/build/ directory ?

I've got a directory for each CPAN perl Module I installed via the CPANPLUS.SlackBuild as well as the older ones I installed directly via the CPAN shell.

Anyhow, for each CPAN Module, there is either a Makefile or a Build file ( and sometimes both ).

The Makefiles I've inspected each has an uninstall target.

Not so with the Build files

You MIGHT be able to do something like `make uninstall` for each of the CPAN Modules with Makefiles and then figure something out for the ( nasty ) Build files ???

HTH and good luck !

-- kjh

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks kjhambrick for your answer. To tell you the truth I used the 'scorched earth' policy and:

1. Eliminated every vestige of Perl from my setup
2. Reloaded the base Perl from my -current local tree
3. Used cpan2tgz to install my required modules

This whole effort to more easily get MusicBrainz support for abcde .