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You are here: manpages

POD2MAN

Section: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (1)
Updated: 2017-08-16
Index Return to Main Contents

NAME

pod2man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input

SYNOPSIS

pod2man [--center=string] [--date=string] [--errors=style]
    [--fixed=font] [--fixedbold=font] [--fixeditalic=font]
    [--fixedbolditalic=font] [--name=name] [--nourls]
    [--official] [--quotes=quotes] [--release=version]
    [--section=manext] [--stderr] [--utf8] [--verbose]
    [input [output] ...]

pod2man --help

DESCRIPTION

pod2man is a front-end for Pod::Man, using it to generate *roff input from POD source. The resulting *roff code is suitable for display on a terminal using nroff(1), normally via man(1), or printing using troff(1).

input is the file to read for POD source (the POD can be embedded in code). If input isn't given, it defaults to "STDIN". output, if given, is the file to which to write the formatted output. If output isn't given, the formatted output is written to "STDOUT". Several POD files can be processed in the same pod2man invocation (saving module load and compile times) by providing multiple pairs of input and output files on the command line.

--section, --release, --center, --date, and --official can be used to set the headers and footers to use; if not given, Pod::Man will assume various defaults. See below or Pod::Man for details.

pod2man assumes that your *roff formatters have a fixed-width font named "CW". If yours is called something else (like "CR"), use --fixed to specify it. This generally only matters for troff output for printing. Similarly, you can set the fonts used for bold, italic, and bold italic fixed-width output.

Besides the obvious pod conversions, Pod::Man, and therefore pod2man also takes care of formatting func(), func(n), and simple variable references like $foo or @bar so you don't have to use code escapes for them; complex expressions like $fred{'stuff'} will still need to be escaped, though. It also translates dashes that aren't used as hyphens into en dashes, makes long dashes---like this---into proper em dashes, fixes ``paired quotes,'' and takes care of several other troff-specific tweaks. See Pod::Man for complete information.

OPTIONS

-c string, --center=string

Sets the centered page header for the ".TH" macro to string. The default is ``User Contributed Perl Documentation'', but also see --official below.

-d string, --date=string

Set the left-hand footer string for the ".TH" macro to string. By default, the modification date of the input file will be used, or the current date if input comes from "STDIN", and will be based on UTC (so that the output will be reproducible regardless of local time zone).

--errors=style

Set the error handling style. "die" says to throw an exception on any POD formatting error. "stderr" says to report errors on standard error, but not to throw an exception. "pod" says to include a POD ERRORS section in the resulting documentation summarizing the errors. "none" ignores POD errors entirely, as much as possible.

The default is "die".

--fixed=font

The fixed-width font to use for verbatim text and code. Defaults to "CW". Some systems may want "CR" instead. Only matters for troff(1) output.

--fixedbold=font

Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to "CB". Only matters for troff(1) output.

--fixeditalic=font

Italic version of the fixed-width font (actually, something of a misnomer, since most fixed-width fonts only have an oblique version, not an italic version). Defaults to "CI". Only matters for troff(1) output.

--fixedbolditalic=font

Bold italic (probably actually oblique) version of the fixed-width font. Pod::Man doesn't assume you have this, and defaults to "CB". Some systems (such as Solaris) have this font available as "CX". Only matters for troff(1) output.

-h, --help

Print out usage information.

-l, --lax

No longer used. pod2man used to check its input for validity as a manual page, but this should now be done by podchecker(1) instead. Accepted for backward compatibility; this option no longer does anything.

-n name, --name=name

Set the name of the manual page for the ".TH" macro to name. Without this option, the manual name is set to the uppercased base name of the file being converted unless the manual section is 3, in which case the path is parsed to see if it is a Perl module path. If it is, a path like ".../lib/Pod/Man.pm" is converted into a name like "Pod::Man". This option, if given, overrides any automatic determination of the name.

Although one does not have to follow this convention, be aware that the convention for UNIX man pages for commands is for the man page title to be in all-uppercase, even if the command isn't.

This option is probably not useful when converting multiple POD files at once.

When converting POD source from standard input, this option is required, since there's otherwise no way to know what to use as the name of the manual page.

--nourls

Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL. In other words:

    L<foo|http://example.com/>

is formatted as:

    foo <http://example.com/>

This flag, if given, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given, so this example would be formatted as just "foo". This can produce less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are not particularly important.

-o, --official

Set the default header to indicate that this page is part of the standard Perl release, if --center is not also given.

-q quotes, --quotes=quotes

Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes. If quotes is a single character, it is used as both the left and right quote. Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of the string is used as the left quote and the second is used as the right quote.

quotes may also be set to the special value "none", in which case no quote marks are added around C<> text (but the font is still changed for troff output).

-r version, --release=version

Set the centered footer for the ".TH" macro to version. By default, this is set to the version of Perl you run pod2man under. Setting this to the empty string will cause some *roff implementations to use the system default value.

Note that some system "an" macro sets assume that the centered footer will be a modification date and will prepend something like ``Last modified: ''. If this is the case for your target system, you may want to set --release to the last modified date and --date to the version number.

-s string, --section=string

Set the section for the ".TH" macro. The standard section numbering convention is to use 1 for user commands, 2 for system calls, 3 for functions, 4 for devices, 5 for file formats, 6 for games, 7 for miscellaneous information, and 8 for administrator commands. There is a lot of variation here, however; some systems (like Solaris) use 4 for file formats, 5 for miscellaneous information, and 7 for devices. Still others use 1m instead of 8, or some mix of both. About the only section numbers that are reliably consistent are 1, 2, and 3.

By default, section 1 will be used unless the file ends in ".pm", in which case section 3 will be selected.

--stderr

By default, pod2man dies if any errors are detected in the POD input. If --stderr is given and no --errors flag is present, errors are sent to standard error, but pod2man does not abort. This is equivalent to "--errors=stderr" and is supported for backward compatibility.

-u, --utf8

By default, pod2man produces the most conservative possible *roff output to try to ensure that it will work with as many different *roff implementations as possible. Many *roff implementations cannot handle non-ASCII characters, so this means all non-ASCII characters are converted either to a *roff escape sequence that tries to create a properly accented character (at least for troff output) or to "X".

This option says to instead output literal UTF-8 characters. If your *roff implementation can handle it, this is the best output format to use and avoids corruption of documents containing non-ASCII characters. However, be warned that *roff source with literal UTF-8 characters is not supported by many implementations and may even result in segfaults and other bad behavior.

Be aware that, when using this option, the input encoding of your POD source should be properly declared unless it's US-ASCII. Pod::Simple will attempt to guess the encoding and may be successful if it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will warn, which by default results in a pod2man failure. Use the "=encoding" command to declare the encoding. See perlpod(1) for more information.

-v, --verbose

Print out the name of each output file as it is being generated.

EXIT STATUS

As long as all documents processed result in some output, even if that output includes errata (a "POD ERRORS" section generated with "--errors=pod"), pod2man will exit with status 0. If any of the documents being processed do not result in an output document, pod2man will exit with status 1. If there are syntax errors in a POD document being processed and the error handling style is set to the default of "die", pod2man will abort immediately with exit status 255.

DIAGNOSTICS

If pod2man fails with errors, see Pod::Man and Pod::Simple for information about what those errors might mean.

EXAMPLES

    pod2man program > program.1
    pod2man SomeModule.pm /usr/perl/man/man3/SomeModule.3
    pod2man --section=7 note.pod > note.7

If you would like to print out a lot of man page continuously, you probably want to set the C and D registers to set contiguous page numbering and even/odd paging, at least on some versions of man(7).

    troff -man -rC1 -rD1 perl.1 perldata.1 perlsyn.1 ...

To get index entries on "STDERR", turn on the F register, as in:

    troff -man -rF1 perl.1

The indexing merely outputs messages via ".tm" for each major page, section, subsection, item, and any "X<>" directives. See Pod::Man for more details.