Ok, so my system isn't dead but it's doing weird things since I last used CPAN.pm. To be fair, though, I did something weird to it, so maybe we're even.

My question is whether CPAN.pm had anything to do with it, or did something else happen on my system (like a Fedora update over the weekend, for example) to cause the weird behavior. Otherwise, this isn't a perl question so feel free to ignore all the extra details that I'm about to give.

I have CPAN.pm configured to install everything in ~/perl and I always run it as myself (not root), so my assumption would be that I couldn't have inadvertantly stomped on any system files.

On Friday, I was installing Net::SSH::Perl via cpan.pm, which drew in a large number of prerequisites & dependencies. In the middle of this I frantically hit ctrl-C to interrupt the process because I was being forced to leave (my wife called telling me I was already late).

On Monday, I discovered that tcsh won't run for me anymore (that's the shell I happen to like to use... don't try to change my mind). Whenever I try to run it, it seg faults.

This is as far as I could narrow it down, and my only question is whether my mess-up using CPAN.pm could have possibly caused this (and if so, what are your thoughts on how to fix it):

  • - From a root prompt, I couldn't su to my own username.... I would just get a root promt again (later discovered that tcsh was crashing with a segmentation fault.)
  • - when I changed my shell (chsh) to something other than tcsh (csh is linked to tcsh), I could su to my username, but I could not run tcsh from there (segmentation fault)
  • - when logged in as root, I could run tcsh just fine.
  • - my home directory is normally NFS mounted from a central file server. When I replace it with a "real" local directory, then tcsh doesn't have any problem. I've tried chaning the way nfs mounts the directory (automount vs. hard mount, etc) but none of that makes a difference. There's nothing wrong with the mount, though... I can see/access all files & directories ok, no delays or network errors.
  • - tried rebooting, but no improvement
  • - tried removing my .tcshrc & .login, no improvement
  • - the system /etc/csh.cshrc and /etc/csh.login files are executed to completion before the seg fault occurs.

    Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!

    In reply to Can CPAN.pm kill my system? by btr

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