Well, that is all fine and good but the command given above does not do anything for me on either linux (perl 5.8.0) or win32 (perl 5.6.1 active state build 631). All I get is the command prompt back.

See (win32):

C:\Data\Scripts>perl -mCPAN -e "shell"

C:\Data\Scripts>perl -mCPAN -e "shell"

C:\Data\Scripts>
[download]

Ed