There is an ongoing outage on the primary CPAN mirror. It is possible to work around the issue by using MetaCPAN as a mirror.

Squashes together the parts of ack into the single ack-standalone file.

The arguments to squash are either filenames from the ack distro like Ack.pm, or module names like File::Next. For modules, squash loads them and then pushes them into ack-standalone.

POD gets stripped from all modules.