a [
authorlist
]
Searches for CPAN authors. Arguments can be strings to be matched exactly or regular expressions, which must be enclosed in slashes and are matched in case-insensitive fashion. With no arguments, it returns a list of all authors, by CPAN ID. With arguments, it returns a list of authors if there is more than one that matches the criteria, or it returns additional information if a single author is returned. String and regular expression arguments can be combined in the same command.
cpan> a /^nv/ LWALL Author NVPAT (Nathan V. Patwardhan) Author LWALL (Larry Wall. Author of Perl. Busy man.) cpan> a /^nv/ Author id = NVPAT EMAIL [email protected] FULLNAME Nathan V. Patwardhan