What hidden bits of functionality have you found in CPAN? Not the popular modules like DBI and Template that everybody knows about. Not the modules that you use every day. I mean some little module, or part of a module, that:

For example, while I was writing Test::Class I needed something to return the calling order of methods in a class hierarchy.

A quick poke around CPAN didn't produce any results so I coded my own variant. A few weeks later I found self_and_super_path in Class::ISA which did exactly what I wanted. Nice!

So, what little gems have you found in CPAN that nobody else has heard of, and would have trouble finding even if they had?


2002/10/23 - 23:00 GMT
New rule: If there is a perl.com article on a module, or you know who has written an article on it - it's not a hidden gem :-)

In reply to Mining the hidden gems of CPAN by adrianh

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