http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=689050


in reply to Re^2: Installing CPAN on a Windows system
in thread Installing CPAN on a Windows system

Just a guess, but CPAN may be looking for cl.exe because it found nmake in your path. For MinGW/gcc, you should be using dmake rather than MSVC's nmake and cl. Among other places, you can find dmake on CPAN.