Re: Can CPAN.pm kill my system?

When testing, make sure you find *all* files that tcsh may access (i.e. the man page also talks about: .cshdirs, .history, .cshrc, and others in the FILES section).

my home directory is normally NFS mounted from a central file server.

My sympathies. :-) Are the tcsh related files on NFS the exact same ones as on the local directory you tested?

tried removing my .tcshrc & .login, no improvement

Make sure you remove all of the tcsh related files (as above). See if the mtime on any of these has changed unexpectedly and/or compare to a backup.

Are any filesystems full, esp your home dir or /tmp?

Comment on Re: Can CPAN.pm kill my system?

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[Re^2: Can CPAN.pm kill my system? by btr (Novice) on Oct 25, 2005 at 15:52 UTC
Thanks for the suggestion. I discovered that .history was causing the problem. I don't know yet what it was about the file that did this, or how it got corrupt, but removing the file and letting tcsh recreate it has solved the problem. Thanks again. I appreciate your help. Mischief managed.	[reply]
Re: [Re^2: Can CPAN.pm kill my system? by Ultra (Hermit) on Oct 25, 2005 at 16:05 UTC
It would be nice if you'd run strace on tcsh while having the "bad" history file in place. This way you may have a chance to find out more about the crash, and maybe fill a bug report too ;-) Dodge This!	[reply]
Re: [Re^2: Can CPAN.pm kill my system? by bluto (Curate) on Oct 25, 2005 at 16:16 UTC
I've seen something similar with zsh when I start another shell (e.g. ksh) and it writes into the same history file since they seem to have different formats. I now setup separate history files depending on what shell I'm using (e.g. ".history_zsh"). I don't know if tcsh supports changing the name, nor if CPAN could cause this, so YMMV.	[reply]