The intent of File::ShareDir is to provide a companion to Class::Inspector and File::HomeDir, modules that take a process that is well-known by advanced Perl developers but gets a little tricky, and make it more available to the larger Perl community. Quite often you want or need your Perl module (CPAN or otherwise) to have access to a large amount of read-only data that is stored on the file-system at run-time. On a linux-like system, this would be in a place such as /usr/share, however Perl runs on a wide variety of different systems, and so the use of any one location is unreliable. Perl provides a little-known method for doing this, but almost nobody is aware that it exists. As a result, module authors often go through some very strange ways to make the data available to their code. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-ShareDir/