I have this code snippit in my archive of useful stuff. It originated from somebody else's post on perlmonks, but I'm not sure who.

!#/usr/local/bin/perl
use CPAN;

for my $mod (CPAN::Shell->expand("Module","/./")){
        next unless $mod->inst_file;
    print $mod->id, '(', $mod->inst_version, ') ';
    unless($mod->uptodate()) {
            print "\t\t#( V. ",$mod->cpan_version, " available on CPAN
+)";
    }
    print "\n";
}
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