Wow, oddly that worked. I had previously thought that notest() was like force(), in that it actually did something. I was calling force() like this:

    $obj->force('install');
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But that wasn't working. So I tried calling notest() in the same way:

    $obj->notest('install');
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This isn't documented anywhere, but I just generalized from the force() method usage. However, looking at the CPAN.pm code, the notest() method just sets a 'notest' flag in the module object. So after seeing your reply, I decided to look into notest() again. This is what I eventually found works:

    $obj->notest();
    $obj->install();
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I need (or at least would prefer) to be able to do this using the CPAN API, rather than running the cpan utility as an external program, and now it looks like I can.

Thanks for the response.