http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=570523


in reply to Getting a List of Modules from the CPAN without your Browser?

You mentioned in the update about CPAN-Search-Lite - there's a script in that distribution: csl_soap, which can be used to get information on CPAN modules, distributions, and authors from a remote SOAP server (it just requires SOAP-Lite and Getopt-Long, not the full CPAN-Search-Lite package). To see it work, near the top of the script, set

my $soap_uri = 'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN_Search_CGI'; my $soap_proxy = 'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/cgi-bin/soap.cgi';
and then you can use it as
C:\Perl\bin>csl_soap --dist Catalyst-Plugin-Pluggable Distribution: Catalyst-Plugin-Pluggable Abstract: Plugin for Pluggable Catalyst applications Version: 0.04 CPAN author: SRI CPAN file: Catalyst-Plugin-Pluggable-0.04.tar.gz Size: 3.0 KB bytes Last modified: 28 Nov 2005
This doesn't do wildcard searches - it's just there as a proof-of-concept - but could readily be adapted to do so if there was interest.