That's very helpful advice from an expert, BUT

1. Which directory should one be in for downloading?

2. To which directory should one unzip?

3. There seems to be a mysterious (to me) database somewhere maintained by the cpan command on my computer. If this is correct then the database needs to be synced after manual intervention. How should one do this syncing??

A related question: why do the manual commands (given as root) work (on my system) for szabgab's commands (including sudo ftp for the download), while sudo cpan's invocations of ftp (in many different guises, including wget, etc) all fail?

Thanks

David