Whenever I encounter this, I just type "y", then Enter, and move along. I never faced the situation that it resulted core dump or something. The fact that Other job not responding is a strong indication that the lock file is staled. No magic, no harm, life is good, and CPAN is cool. Well, Perl is great :-)

But if this was multiuser host, and I wasn't the only one who had the root privileges, I would first check with the other person to make sure. I myself, don't run cpan with root account. And I'm a single person who uses my laptop, but that doesn't mean I use single account :-)