It mostly does what you want. You have to setup your shell vars and stuff but there are shortcuts in the doc to do that. You can also bootstrap it without needing an admin to put it in. I've done it on a couple different hosts for several different accounts and been really pleased/surprised. In part the best thing about it is just that it normalized the procedure. I was doing it ad hoc on every account, which sounds like the same hassle you were going through, and now even if it's more work than sudo cpan Module List at least it's sane and predictable everywhere I use it.