Here's a neat trick to find out what version of a Perl module is installed.

Let's try with Carp .

perl -MCarp\ 99999 -e 1 Carp version 99999 required--this is only version 1.42. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

The way this works is that we ask the runtime to load a very high version, and then wait for perl to apologize that it only has current version x, in this case 1.42 .