I had this problem on a Centos cloud server.
The obvious first thing is to make sure tar is installed. Look for a file /bin/tar or possibly /usr/bin/tar and make sure it exists.
Then make sure the tar config directive is set in cpan. do
cpan> o conf tar
and it should respond something like tar [/bin/tar]
If it doesn’t respond with the correct directory for /bin/tar, do
cpan> o conf tar /bin/tar (or /usr/bin/tar or wherever it is)
cpan> o conf commit
Still not working?
The issue that I ran into was there was not enough kernel memory, and apparently this is a common issue in virtual systems.
All I did was stop mysql and that was enough. I don’t fully understand why this last step was necessary to solve the issue as
I figured the resource manager would be intelligent enough to figure it out.