The cpanm installed by the command you found is a good solution. Essentially the problem you had is that when you install (properly distributed) executable files from CPAN, such as cpanm, its shebang is rewritten so that it executes with the Perl it was installed to. This is important, because only the Perl it is installed to is guaranteed to have its prerequisites installed at that point, among other things. It turns out this isn't very important for cpanm though as it's pure-Perl and has no non-core dependencies, so you can instead just download the fatpacked version from https://cpanmin.us and run it with any Perl you like, to install things to that Perl: wget -qO /path/to/cpanm.pl https://cpanmin.us; /path/to/perl /path/to/cpanm.pl $args The install-cpanm command uses a similar method. My strategy is to grab this fatpacked cpanm, and use it to install App::cpanminus to each Perl I work with.