Right -- I have something quite similar (but a little shorter ;) in my .bashrc:

pmversion () 
{ 
    perl -M$1 -le "print $1->VERSION"
}
[download]

Note that bash interpolates both instances of "$1" before perl gets to read the script.

Also, since I tend to work in a rather "diversified" network environment, it's useful to be able to spot the path to a given module:

pmpath () 
{ 
    perl -M$1 -le "print \$INC{'$1.pm'}"
}
[download]

Here, I have to guard (escape) the "$" in front of INC so the shell leaves it as-is and perl sees it as "$INC"; bash ignores the single-quotes because they're inside "...", and perl does the right thing there, because $1 has already been interpolated by the shell.

UPDATE: The "pmpath" approach above only works for "top-level" modules. In order to get the path for a module like "Foo::Bar::Baz", it's a bit more complicated:

pmpath () 
{ 
    perl -M$1 -le "(\$_='$1')=~s{::}{/}g; print \$INC{\$_.'.pm'}"
}
[download]

My apologies for the misleading initial version.

FINAL UPDATE: There's actually a much better method for finding the path to a module, as pointed out by Your Mother below.