You can use CPAN::Mini to create a mirror of CPAN (but including only the newest version of each module, which reduces the size to something around 1GB). Of course that needs to be done on a machine that does have internet access (but you have access to such a machine, otherwise you couldn't ask on perlmonks :-).

You can put that mirror on an USB stick, and configure the urllist of your CPAN client to use that mirror.

I personally use such a setup even when I'm online, because it speeds up module installs significantly. Works pretty well.

If you wanted to continue using your free Unix account, then doing something like what moritz suggested would probably be the best route to go.

If you wanted to go a different route, here's a few suggestions about alternatives to using your free Unix account.

• Perl isn't available only on *nix operating systems. You could try Perl on your home computer that has internet access.
• I'm guessing that your home system is not running some kind of *nix OS and that you're wanting to learn Perl in an *nix environment. One alternative would be to use some kind of hypervisor (such as VirtualBox, which happens to be 100% free) and run a *nix based virtual machine on your home system. Then you would have your own *nix system to test with.

tar xvzf foo.tar.gz
cd foo
[download]

then either

perl Build.PL --install_base "$HOME"
./Build
./Build test
./Build install
[download]

perl Makefile.PL INSTALLBASE="$HOME"
make
make test
make install
[download]

Tell Perl how to locate the modules you install by stuffing the following in your login script:

export PERL5LIB="$HOME/lib/perl5"
[download]

There are two catches:

• You'll have to satisfy dependencies. IIRC, Makefile.PL and Build.PL will tell you which dependencies aren't satisfied.
• Dependencies on external (non-Perl) libraries will be hard to install. Normally, one would use the OS distribution's package system, but that's not available to you. If you want to install XML::LibXML (for example), you'll have figure out how to install libxml2 (the underlying C++ library) into your account if it's not already installed on the system.

Do you need to really use that (or any) Unix system? Most of what you can do with Perl is platform independent so you can use a Windows machine for that - if it is easier to put your hand on one.

Try DWIM Perl for Windows which is a Strawberry Perl derivative that already contains a few hundred modules.