Perl stopped working

[René Berber]

On 4/17/2025 9:52 AM, Michael via Cygwin wrote:

> After running cygwin-setup and updating all cygwin-packages, perl no longer seems to work (or maybe a coincidence).
> 
> Executing "perl" without any argument normally let perl wait for input from stdin/keyboard.
> But it immediately returns to the prompt (same behavior as 'echo ""').
> I can do
> perl
> perl -v
> perl -e 'print "Hello Perl\n"'
> 
> same result for all 3 of them (equal to 'echo ""').
[snip]
That usually means a library is missing.

Try:

$ cygcheck /usr/bin/perl
C:\Cygwin\bin\perl.exe
   C:\Cygwin\bin\cygperl5_40.dll
     C:\Cygwin\bin\cygcrypt-2.dll
       C:\Cygwin\bin\cygwin1.dll
         C:\WINDOWS\system32\KERNEL32.dll
           C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntdll.dll
           C:\WINDOWS\system32\KERNELBASE.dll
     C:\Cygwin\bin\cyggcc_s-seh-1.dll

or 'ldd /usr/bin/perl' and see if any library is marked as not found.

The problem could be a bad PATH, which finds another library of the same 
name first, a deleted/not installed library (find dependencies with
'cygcheck -i --deps perl').
-- 
R.B.