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 FAQ Keyword

DESCRIPTION

perldoc looks up a piece of documentation in .pod format that is embedded in the perl installation tree or in a perl script, and displays it via 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 may also have man 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 docs using plain text converter, instead of nroff. This may be faster, but it won't look as nice.
-u unformatted: Find docs only; skip reformatting by pod2*
-m module: Display the entire module: both code and unformatted pod documentation. This may be useful if the docs don't explain a function in the detail you need, and you'd like to inspect the code directly; perldoc 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 perlfunc: The -f option followed by the name of a perl built in function will extract the documentation of this function from the perlfunc manpage.
-q 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 basename matches the name given on the command line in the file $Config{archlib}/pod.idx. The pod.idx file should contain fully qualified filenames, 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 may also give a descriptive name of a page, such as perlfunc. You make 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. perldoc 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 itself, are available.) perldoc 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 was told to display plain text or unformatted pod.)

AUTHOR

Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds@kjahds.com>

Minor updates by Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafcol.lafayette.edu>

DISCLAIMER

We are painfully aware that these documents may contain incorrect links and misformatted HTML. Such bugs lie in the automatic translation process that automatically created the hundreds and hundreds of separate documents that you find here. Please do not report link or formatting bugs, because we cannot fix per-document problems. The only bug reports that will help us are those that supply working patches to the installhtml or pod2html programs, or to the Pod::HTML module itself, for which I and the entire Perl community will shower you with thanks and praises.

If rather than formatting bugs, you encounter substantive content errors in these documents, such as mistakes in the explanations or code, please use the perlbug utility included with the Perl distribution.

--Tom Christiansen, Perl Documentation Compiler and Editor

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