Unable to load Strawberry perl shell on windows 7

perl_omens has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear All,

Greetings. I use strawberry perl on windows 7. I use command "perl-MCPAN -e shell" to install perl modules from CPAN. When I was installing Padre (Perl IDE) by issuing command

cpan> install Padre
[download]

and the process was in the middle then there was power trip due to which my PC rebooted. Now whenever I try to load perl shell (perl -MCPAN -e shell) on perl cmmand line (DOS) it gives following fatal error:

**************************************************************

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\>perl -MCPAN -e shell
Argument "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0" isn't numeric 
+in numeric
 eq (==) at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/CPAN.pm line 728.

There seems to be running another CPAN process (pid                   
+    ).  Co
ntacting...
Can't kill a non-numeric process ID at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/CPAN.pm 
+line 733.

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[download]

I rebooted my PC but in vain. Please suggest problem resolution and throw some pointers.

Regards,

perl_omens

Comment on Unable to load Strawberry perl shell on windows 7 Select or Download Code

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Re: Unable to load Strawberry perl shell on windows 7 by snoopy (Curate) on Aug 04, 2011 at 02:15 UTC
CPAN takes out a lock to make sure that it is only running once. The lock file normally contains a PID of the other CPAN process. It seems that the content of this file has become corrupted and contains null characters. CPAN is then choking when it tries to kill a non-numeric PID. The simple solution is hopefully to remove the ".lock" file before running CPAN. Do the following to find the path to CPAN home. `perl -MCPAN::Config -e "print $CPAN::Config->{cpan_home}"` [download] Then look for and remove the file named `.lock` under that path.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Unable to load Strawberry perl shell on windows 7 by dasgar (Priest) on Aug 03, 2011 at 20:59 UTC
My guess is that some files were corrupted during the power loss. My first thought on recovery would be to revert to a backup of the OS (or filesystem) if you have one. My second thought would be to reinstall Strawberry Perl as well as any other modules that were installed.	[reply]