Terminal funkiness with ActiveState perl
I just finally got on top of an annoyance I've had for a while: on my work machine I use MKS Toolkit - which provides a lot of the common unix tools for developers using windows. It provides its own Perl build, but I've been using ActiveState's for a while, and didnt want to complicate synchronizing my work across the different machines I use perl on. An unhappy side-effect of installing MKS Toolkit though is that the CPAN interactive shell suddenly starting spitting goobledy-gook to the terminal.
I looked around in the CPAN config, remembering there was some terminal questions in the setup, but nothing I changed had any effect. Not having had to mess with terminal settings / shell environment much before I was stumped until I googled a little and found this:
Turns out MKS Toolkit changes the TERM environment variable to nutc, which ActiveState's perl doesnt support. They suggest using ansi or vt100, which worked for me:set TERM=ansi.