Randy Kobes the author and maintainer of cpan-search has released a version of perldoc-soap. This acts like the normal perldoc except that it will search a remote SOAP server for documentation about modules that aren't installed locally.

The additional features that it adds to perldoc are as follows:

    -I   get information on ModuleName or DistributionName
    -R   fetch the README for the ModuleName distribution or Distribut
+ionName 
    -L   list modules in DistributionName
    -M   search for modules containing SearchTerm
    -D   search for distributions containing SearchTerm
    -A   search for CPAN authors containing SearchTerm
    -N   list distributions uploaded in last SearchTerm days
[download]

If nothing else this allows you to read a module's documentation before you download it.

John.
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