in reply to CPAN non-root questions
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your question, this is all covered in the CPAN FAQ. http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_install_private
"I have never written bad code. There are merely unanticipated features."
In short, you can govern where the files are built to on the command line. You can override the default cpan config file by simply creating a .cpan directory structure and config file in your home directory. Pretty sure all of that is covered in the CPAN faq though.
"I have never written bad code. There are merely unanticipated features."
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom