CONTENTS

• NAME
• SYNOPSIS
• DESCRIPTION
• OPTIONS
• SECURITY
• ENVIRONMENT
• CHANGES
• SEE ALSO
• AUTHOR

#NAME

perldoc - Look up Perl documentation in Pod format.

#SYNOPSIS

perldoc [-h] [-D] [-t] [-u] [-m] [-l] [-U] [-F]
    [-i] [-V] [-T] [-r]
    [-d destination_file]
    [-o formatname]
    [-M FormatterClassName]
    [-w formatteroption:value]
    [-n nroff-replacement]
    [-X]
    [-L language_code]
    PageName|ModuleName|ProgramName|URL

Examples:

perldoc -f BuiltinFunction

perldoc -L it -f BuiltinFunction

perldoc -q FAQ Keyword

perldoc -L fr -q FAQ Keyword

perldoc -v PerlVariable

perldoc -a PerlAPI

See below for more description of the switches.

#DESCRIPTION

perldoc looks up documentation in .pod format that is embedded in the perl installation tree or in a perl script, and displays it using a variety of formatters. 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.

If you are looking for a table of contents to the Perl library modules documentation, see the perltoc page.

#OPTIONS

#-h

Prints out a brief help message.

#-D

Describes search for the item in detail.

#-t

Display docs using plain text converter, instead of nroff. This may be faster, but it probably won't look as nice.

#-u

Skip the real Pod formatting, and just show the raw Pod source (Unformatted)

#-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

Display only the file name of the module found.

#-U

When running as the superuser, don't attempt drop privileges for security. This option is implied with -F.

NOTE: Please see the heading SECURITY below for more information.

#-F

Consider arguments as file names; no search in directories will be performed. Implies -U if run as the superuser.

#