a

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