Over the years, CPAN.pm has accumulated a staggering number of configuration options. Recently, an otherwise expert Perl programmer (that I won’t embarrass by name) asked on IRC for the name of an option rather than reading the (admittedly long) manual. This reminded me that many Perl users may not know about a handy feature that has been in the CPAN shell since 2006:
cpan> o conf /MATCH/ cpan> o conf init /MATCH/
The first form will show all options matching a pattern. The second will re-run interactive configuration with explanatory paragraphs for all options matching a pattern.
Thanks to these features, I rarely actually read the manual. As long as I have a rough idea what the option name might be, I just search for it. And I can always fall back on “o conf” to see all options and then “o conf init NAME” to read the paragraph about any particular one.