You could break the cycle by downloading individual tarballs, e.g: 
    cpan> get K/KW/KWILLIAMS/PathTools-3.03.tar.gz

[download]
hunt it down on disk (~/.cpan/sources/...), untar, build and install manually: 
    tar zxfv PathTools-3.03.tar.gz
    cd PathTools-3.03
    perl Makefile.PL
    make install

[download]

In reply to Re: CPAN, recursive dependency problem by saintmike
in thread CPAN, recursive dependency problem by ecsd

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