Great idea. I was a bit nervous that the shell might mark HOME as read-only, but it appears to work just fine: 
  cpan -J | egrep keep_source_where
      'keep_source_where' => '/home/jpl/.cpan/sources',

  HOME=/fs/perl cpan -J | egrep keep_source_where
      'keep_source_where' => '/fs/perl/.cpan/sources',

[download]
So, in the end, what I had to do was
  1. Install File::HomeDir from CPAN (it's not part of the core distribution), and
  2. Copy the MyConfig.pm from /home/jpl/.cpan/CPAN to /fs/perl/.cpan/CPAN (and make sure all the references to my home directory had been replaced with /fs/perl.)
There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with getting started. If you use the CPAN shell to install File::HomeDir, then you may already have modified the config file under your home directory. It is probably prudent to back it up before doing anything, although the initialization process made a copy in MyConfig.pm~ in my case, so I could restore the original after getting everything set up under /fs/perl.

In reply to Re^2: CPAN shared by multiple users by jpl
in thread CPAN shared by multiple users by jpl

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