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 | $PAGER". (In addition, if running under HP-UX,
"col -x" will be used.) This is primarily used for the documentation for
the perl library modules.
Your system may also have man pages installed for those modules, in
which case you can probably just use the man(1) command.
OPTIONS
-h help
Prints out a brief help message.
-v verbose
Describes search for the item in detail.
-t text output
Display docs using plain text converter, instead of nroff. This may be faster,
but it won't look as nice.
-u unformatted
Find docs only; skip reformatting by pod2*
-m module
Display the entire module: both code and unformatted pod documentation.
This may be useful if the docs don't explain a function in the detail
you need, and you'd like to inspect the code directly; perldoc will find
the file for you and simply hand it off for display.
-l file name only
Display the file name of the module found.
-F file names
Consider arguments as file names, no search in directories will be performed.
-f perlfunc
The -f option followed by the name of a perl built in function will
extract the documentation of this function from perlfunc.
-q perlfaq
The -q option takes a regular expression as an argument. It will search
the question headings in perlfaq[1-9] and print the entries matching
the regular expression.
-X use an index if present
The -X option looks for a entry whose basename matches the name given on the
command line in the file "$Config{archlib}/pod.idx". The pod.idx file should
contain fully qualified filenames, one per line.
-U run insecurely
Because perldoc does not run properly tainted, and is known to
have security issues, it will not normally execute as the superuser.
If you use the -U flag, it will do so, but only after setting
the effective and real IDs to nobody's or nouser's account, or -2
if unavailable. If it cannot relinguish its privileges, it will not
run.
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 may 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.)
One useful value for "PERLDOC_PAGER" is "less -+C -E".