My advice is to run your stuff by other people before uploading, if you're not sure. Choosing the wrong module name will get you grief from others. Some people don't read the pause docs and use non-descriptive top-level namespaces (e.g. Water !?) or create a namespace for their cpanid (e.g. DPCHRIST).

And instead of just reading docs to figure out the conventions, choose a few respected, and recently updated, modules to crib from.

Although there is no formal quality control, people do make use of the cpan ratings to voice their opinion.

From what I've seen most modules are unrated. Of those that are rated many have either been rated by the author or by members of the author's fan club, or by someone with a bee in their bonnet about some particular aspect of the module. I advise taking CPAN module ratings with a very large grain of salt!

True laziness is hard work

And if you want to share but don't care about quality or maintenance, you could always upload to github or bitbucket.

Thanks for your input.

Rest assured that I was never planning to upload junk, but scripts which I consider to be good quality, and which others around me agree, however I am thinking single file perl scripts rather than perl modules or applications where the logic live in .pm files rather than the main script.

From Corion's advice, it looks like the best approach would be to refactor the script to move as much functionality as is reasonable into separate perl modules or classes. These perl modules can then be shared on CPAN. The (hopefully) small script that is left after most of it's logic goes into modules can then be added as an optional script in the /bin directory of one of the module bundles.

Thinking about how I would do that re-factoring, I considered the functional components and searched CPAN for equivalent code by other authors. I found that in one area (An interface to IMDB someone else has already an alternative module), so I won't be duplicating that, instead I will modify my scripts, to use the module, and will be sending the module author patches and bug reports.

In other areas, I did not find anything on CPAN that covers what I have done, so I guess I will be polishing my code and adding tests so that I can upload it. I don't think I will be uploading any actual scripts for a while.

Thank you all for your comments.