[You find this repeatedly in the archive] Since I had this throughout the versions, including 3.8, I looked into this a bit deeper: cpan -MCPAN -e shell and everything subsequent bombs out with a checksum mismatch.
Here is why, and how to solve it [and why some didn't experience it]: 0. It is a tar problem 1. run cpan fearlessly as you would. When you hit checksum mismatch: "I'd recommend removing /root/.cpan/sources/foo/bar-2.0.tar.gz. Its MD5 checksum is incorrect." simply exit cpan and mv /root/.cpan/sources/foo/bar.tar /root/.cpan/sources/foo/bar.tar.gz (That is, mv the file without .gz to the file with .gz. It does exist; but overwrite is okay !) Start cpan again, until it bombs out. Rinse and repeat: exit - mv - cpan - exit - mv -cpan. Be intelligent and run 'install Bundle::CPAN' in cpan, because the fifths or sixths install of the Bundle will install Compress-Zlib. >From now on, cpan will not resort to the helper applications that you defined earlier (tar, gunzip), but use its own Compress-Zlib. >From here on everything works fine. Without any rinse && repeat. A shortcut to this: you install p5-Compress-Zlib from the ports or packages, and cpan will use this as its native application early on. (Which explains why some have never experienced this problem: all those who had it installed from ports or packages before attempting cpan). Uwe, who considers this 'almost' solved because he didn't look into the underlying problem of gunzip/tar that manifests itself as long as Compress-Zlib is unused