perldoc

NAME

perldoc - Look up perl documentation in pod format.

SYNOPSIS

perldoc [-h] [-v] [-t] [-u] [-m] [-l] [-F]  [-X] PageName|ModuleName|ProgramName
perldoc -f BuiltinFunction
perldoc -q FAQKeyword

DESCRIPTION

The perldoc(1) utility looks up a piece of documentation in .pod format that is embedded in the perl installation tree or in a perl script, and then displays it using pod2man | nroff -man | $PAGER. (In addition, if running under HP-UX, col -x will be used.) This is primarily used for the documentation for the perl library modules.

Your system might also have manual pages installed for those modules, in which case you can probably just use the man(1) command.

OPTIONS

-h

Help. Prints out a brief help message.

-v

Verbose. Describes search for the item in detail.

-t

Text output. Display documents using plain-text converter instead of nroff. This might be faster, but it will not look as nice.

-u

Unformatted. Find documents only; skip reformatting by pod2*.

-m

Module. Display the entire module: both code and unformatted pod documentation. This can be useful if the documents do not explain a function in the detail you need and you want to inspect the code directly; perldoc(1) will find the file for you and simply hand it off for display.

-l

File name only. Display the file name of the module found.

-F

File names. Consider arguments as file names; no search in directories will be performed.

-f BuiltinFunction

perlfunc. The -f option followed by the name of a perl built-in function will extract the documentation of this function from perlfunc.

-q FAQKeyword

perlfaq. The -q option takes a regular expression as an argument. It will search the question headings in perlfaq[1-9] and print the entries matching the regular expression.

-X

Use an index if present. The -X option looks for a entry whose base name matches the name given on the command line in the file $Config{archlib}/pod.idx. The pod.idx file should contain fully qualified file names, one per line.

PageName|ModuleName|ProgramName

The item you want to look up. Nested modules (such as File::Basename) are specified either as File::Basename or File/Basename. You can also give a descriptive name of a page, such as perlfunc. You can also give a partial or wrong case name, such as "basename" for "File::Basename", but this will be slower; if there is more then one page with the same partial name, you will only get the first one.

ENVIRONMENT

Any switches in the PERLDOC environment variable will be used before the command-line arguments. The perldoc(1) utility also searches directories specified by the PERL5LIB (or PERLLIB if PERL5LIB is not defined) and PATH environment variables. (The latter is so that embedded pods for executables, such as perldoc(1) itself, are available.)The perldoc(1) utility will use, in order of preference, the pager defined in PERLDOC_PAGER, MANPAGER, or PAGER before trying to find a pager on its own. (MANPAGER is not used if perldoc(1) was told to display plain text or unformatted pod.)

AUTHOR

Kenneth Albanowski. Minor updates by Andy Dougherty.