I used to use Active Perl on my Mac OS X (v 10.7.5) and then I switched to the one provided via mac ports (v 5.12.4).
Now when I run the CPAN client or the perl debugger, I cannot access the history using ArrowUp and ArrowDown, what is shown at the prompt is ^[[A
and ^[[B
respectively.
At least on the debugger the history works, I can access past commands via !num.
By default the only Term::ReadLine
handler you get is Term::ReadLine::Perl
which is quite simple and doesn't understand things like arrow keys. You probably want to install Term::ReadLine::Gnu
.