Hello Cygwinauts,
I'd like to report a problem I encountered recently try to run CPAN(.pm)
on Cygwinperl to ... you know what CPAN does.
My system is Win98 and I suspect from absence of reports concerning this
that somehow this isn't affecting people on other-derived M$ Windows
platforms. All of this is vis a vis cygwin on these platforms, of
course.
CPAN fails to be able to make or install modules because the system call
to tar(1) returns an error (generates a SIGSEGV [?] signal) when perl
tries to have tar unroll a module archive. On examination, tar is being
called by perl code in the innards of CPAN.pm, with the old-style flags
(switches) un-prefaced by a hyphen/dash/(-) token, e.g.:
$ tar xvf foo.tar
On testing, the stackdump can be caused by manually passing arguments
(flags, switches) to tar(1) without a hyphen. I myself always habitually
use the modern GNU-style with tar, i.e. "$ tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz" when I
run `tar' manually or use it in scripts, so this bug never bit me before
CPAN showed it to me.
Also, sorry, I am composing this message from Debian GNU/Linux, so I
have not the opportunity to generate a "cygcheck.exe" output file to
attach to this message. My `tar' was from cygwin release 1.13.25 and
then I reverted to the previous one (whatever that was). Both tar
versions manifested the same segfault.