So, I was once again setting up CPAN behind a firewall/proxy, and it was a from source build of perl, with no LWP - just Net::FTP. I pretty quickly stumbled on Forcing CPAN.pm to ignore LWP/Net::FTP and use wget/lynx etc which solved the Net::FTP timeout/failure problem. For some reason though, it wasn't finding/attemtping to use any of the command line clients, and so download of the mirror list would fail. So I primed CPAN::Config->{wget} with the path to wget on the box, and viola - off and running. 
#!/appl/my/perl/bin/perl

use CPAN();

$CPAN_has_usable = \&CPAN::has_usable;

local *CPAN::has_usable = sub {
    return if $_[1] =~ /^(?:Net|LWP)/;
    return $CPAN_has_usable->( @_ );
};

$CPAN::Config->{wget} = "/usr/sfw/bin/wget";

CPAN::shell();

[download]
My question is, does anyone have anything... simpler, that would work too? Did I miss something in my googling that addresses this already?

This is one I'll definitely keep in my toolkit... but ideally, something simple enough to recall from memory would be even better. I guess this would suffice - I'd just have to be patient on the Net::FTP timeout: 

perl -MCPAN -e'$CPAN::Config->{wget}="/usr/sfw/bin/wget";CPAN->shell()
+'

[download]

In reply to CPAN, firewall, proxy and FirstTime config... by dcvr69

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