I don't think your fears are justified: I saw it happen a lot. It may happen when you kill the cpan script abruptly ("kill -9") or even shutdown the machine without leaving the shell. The lock file remains there and you may overwrite it without consequences.

It there is really another CPAN process alive, you may look for it in the process list and resume it from there. No horrendous thing comes from overwriting the lockfile. If something gets corrupt, it's only at CPAN local directory (which you find via "o conf cpan_home" and may clean up from bad files at your wish).

As a side note, the latest CPAN (1.902) is even better and offers a degraded mode to let you in without overwriting the lockfile.

In reply to Re: CPAN error: There seems to be running another CPAN process by ferreira
in thread CPAN error: There seems to be running another CPAN process by cormanaz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.