Running perl system and cpan as non-root user...

The easiest method I have found so far is to say

wget -O- http://cpanmin.us | perl - -l ~/perl5 App::cpanminus local::lib

or for non wgetters..

curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - -l ~/perl5 App::cpanminus local::lib

Then:

eval `perl -I ~/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib`
echo 'eval `perl -I ~/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib`' >> ~/.profile

On Linux Systems

echo 'eval `perl -I ~/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib`' >> ~/.bash_profile

This assumes your profile is named .profile, you may need to change that to be .bash_profile, .bashrc, etc. After that you can install modules by saying

cpanm Module::Name

and simply use them the same way you would if the were installed in the root directories. In some cases the install does not work... then you can split things up (for the http_proxy it seems it explicitly needs 'http:' or 'https:'). The second item would add the ignore expired certificate on the wget command.

export http_proxy=http://my.proxy.org:3128
export https_proxy=http://my.proxy.org:3128
export PERL5LIB=~/perl5/lib/perl5/
wget --no-check-certificate -O cpan.pl http://cpanmin.us
perl cpan.pl -l ~/perl5 App::cpanminus local::lib

At times this even fails and use --force

perl cpan.pl --force -l ~/perl5 App::cpanminus local::lib