If a program crashes, it's SIGSEGV that kills it. This results in a different message. 

$ perl -e'kill SEGV => $$'
Segmentation fault

[download]

Killed is received from SIGKILL. 

$ perl -e'kill KILL => $$'
Killed

[download]

I've gotten this when I used too many resources on a shared system (e.g. too much memory or CPU time). Check your ulimits and with your administrator. (I have limits even though ulimit doesn't list any.)

Update: oh, I see you did mention something along those lines. But...

Searching for an answer suggests that this is the OS killing CPAN and the most probable cause is lack of memory. The development unit has a 32Gb SD card

RAM, not disk space.

In reply to Re: Debugging CPAN problem by ikegami
in thread Debugging CPAN problem by Bod

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