Nice idea - and I've just stuck it in my bashrc on my linux box, where it's working fine.

However, in the form in which you've posted it, it won't work with Parse::RecDescent, Inline::C and (probably) some of the other Inline::* modules. So instead, I've written the perl command as:

perl -le "require $m;print $m->VERSION"
[download]

and that seems to work fine for *all* modules (the ones I tested, at least).

Cheers,
Rob