CPAN Perl modules installer not finding tar file

Posted on September 9, 2016

droplet with 512MB RAM running Ubuntu It seems I have a configuration problem when installing Perl modules through CPAN and I don’t know how to correct it:

~$ cpan Terminal does not support AddHistory.

cpan shell – CPAN exploration and modules installation (v2.00) Enter ‘h’ for help.

cpan[1]> install File::Copy::Recursive Reading ‘/home/…/.cpan/Metadata’ Database was generated on Thu, 08 Sep 2016 23:17:02 GMT Running install for module ‘File::Copy::Recursive’ Running make for D/DM/DMUEY/File-Copy-Recursive-0.38.tar.gz Fetching with HTTP::Tiny: http://cpan.mirrors.ionfish.org/authors/id/D/DM/DMUEY/File-Copy-Recursive-0.38.tar.gz Fetching with HTTP::Tiny: http://cpan.mirrors.ionfish.org/authors/id/D/DM/DMUEY/CHECKSUMS Checksum for /home/…/.cpan/sources/authors/id/D/DM/DMUEY/File-Copy-Recursive-0.38.tar.gz ok Scanning cache /home/…/.cpan/build for sizes …DONE

CPAN.pm: Building D/DM/DMUEY/File-Copy-Recursive-0.38.tar.gz

Checking if your kit is complete… Looks good Writing Makefile for File::Copy::Recursive Writing MYMETA.yml and MYMETA.json Can’t exec “make”: No such file or directory at /usr/share/perl/5.18/CPAN/Distribution.pm line 2084. DMUEY/File-Copy-Recursive-0.38.tar.gz make – NOT OK ‘YAML’ not installed, will not store persistent state Running make test Can’t test without successful make Running make install Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible Failed during this command: DMUEY/File-Copy-Recursive-0.38.tar.gz : make NO

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Ryan Quinn

September 12, 2016

CPAN provides some tooling but may require other packages be present on your system in order to do it’s work. If you haven’t already I would recommend doing apt-get install build-essential to install some common packages required for building software.