macaroni has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I just recently installed perl 5.8.0 on my Mac OS X as instructed on http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/perl.html and today when I tried to get to my CPAN prompt, using sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell Password: I get an error of: "CPAN.pm panic: Lockfile /Users/ronballesteros/.cpan/.lock reports other host da0701aba-dhcp113..com and other process 18055. Cannot proceed." Any help would be so appreciated...thanks...

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Re: can't get to CPAN prompt
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Apr 15, 2003 at 17:33 UTC
    The CPAN shell uses a lock file to prohibit 2 people working with the same configuration at the same time. Either someone else is doing the same as you, you have another session running that's not terminated, or a previous sessions was killed in such a way it didn't get a chance to clean up after itself.

    Investigate, solve the problem, and try again.

    Abigail

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Re: can't get to CPAN prompt
by crenz (Priest) on Apr 15, 2003 at 17:50 UTC

    The most probable reason is that your last CPAN session crashed. Did you try to remove /Users/ronballesteros/.cpan/.lock and see what happens? The weird hostname might be a result of your computer being connected to the Internet or to a company server whose DNS gives out nice names to you :)

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      I removed the file as suggested and i was able to get my CPAN prompt but this time i wanted to install Bundle::libnet (which I think i need to use Net::FTP). When I tried running the force install Bundle::libnet, i got an error of Running install for module Data::Dumper Running make for G/GS/GSAR/Data-Dumper-2.101.tar.gz mkdir /Users/ronballesteros/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GS: Permission denied at /System/Library/Perl/CPAN.pm line 2303 What do I need to do to resolve these permission problems....
[reply]
        You need to install the modules as root (or some other user who has permissions to write to the /System/Library/Perl directory). You can do this by either using su at the command line and typing in root's password, or using sudo (in this case, probably sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell;). You can read more about both commands by using man su and man sudo.

        Nota Bene: To use sudo you might need to be in the /etc/sudoers file. If this is the case, you'll need to be root to add yourself to it.

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        Only root has write access to the System directory on OS X. Either configure CPAN to install the modules inside your home directory (using PREFIX) or use

        sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

        to install as root, inside the System directory.

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[d/l]
        In order to be on the sudoers list, open System Preferences, and click on Accounts. Then edit your user, after authentication, so that you 'Can administer this computer' or something like that. If you want life easy, you can sudo pico /etc/csh.login, and add the line 
        alias cpan sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

        [download]
        somewhere in the file. Another tip is to also add 
        alias ll ls -l

        [download]
        Which will allow you to view long file lists more easily. But i'm drifting off topic.

        If you ever find yourself in need of these aliases, and they are not available, you may need to type tcsh -l to get your shell to read the .login file.

        Best of luck!

        -nuffin
        zz zZ Z Z #!perl
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