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

• perl 5.12.3 built from source with '-des'
• Solaris 10 (SPARC)
• http proxy for http/ftp access to internet picked up successfully by FirstTime.pm from http_proxy/ftp_proxy.

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()
+'
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