pmhack
Command-line tool to copy a perl module to a development directory
pmhack Module::Name
Sometimes you want to debug an installed perl module, e.g. by sprinkling some print statements. Instead of being tempted to mess with the module code directly, it is a good practice to copy that module to a development directory, edit it there, and then add that directory to @INC so that perl uses the modified code instead of the original. pmhack is a tool to aid that - it grabs a module from <@INC>, puts it in a directory specified in the PERL5HACKLIB environment variable, creating all additional directories as needed, removes any read-only attributes from the file, and prints the new filename to STDOUT.
@INC
PERL5HACKLIB
STDOUT
Create an environment variable PERL5HACKLIB and set it to a directory where modules will be copied for hacking
You may also want to add the above directory to PERL5LIB so that perl uses your hacked version rather than the installed version by default.
Install App::Pmhack from CPAN. It provides the pmhack command-line tool that you will use to copy modules.
App::Pmhack
CPAN
Peter Shangov <pshangov at yahoo dot com>
This software is copyright (c) 2010 by Peter Shangov.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
To install App::Pmhack, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm App::Pmhack
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install App::Pmhack
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.