POD2MAN(1pm) Perl Programmers Reference Guide POD2MAN(1pm)
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] [--release=version] [--section=manext]
[--quotes=quotes] [--lquote=quote] [--rquote=quote]
[--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.
--lquote=quote
--rquote=quote
Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text. --lquote sets the
left quote mark and --rquote sets the right quote mark. Either may
also be set to the special value "none", in which case no quote
mark is added on that side of C<> text (but the font is still
changed for troff output).
Also see the --quotes option, which can be used to set both quotes
at once. If both --quotes and one of the other options is set,
--lquote or --rquote overrides --quotes.
-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, the name will be
set to "STDIN" if this option is not provided. Providing this
option is strongly recommended to set a meaningful manual page
name.
--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).
Also see the --lquote and --rquote options, which can be used to
set the left and right quotes independently. If both --quotes and
one of the other options is set, --lquote or --rquote overrides
--quotes.
-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.
BUGS
Lots of this documentation is duplicated from Pod::Man.
AUTHOR
Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>, based very heavily on the original pod2man
by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2019 Russ Allbery
<rra@cpan.org>
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
SEE ALSO
Pod::Man(3), Pod::Simple(3), man(1), nroff(1), perlpod(1),
podchecker(1), perlpodstyle(1), troff(1), man(7)
The man page documenting the an macro set may be man(5) instead of
man(7) on your system.
The current version of this script is always available from its web
site at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also
part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
perl v5.34.0 2022-01-04 POD2MAN(1pm)
perl 5.34.0 - Generated Sun Feb 27 16:11:03 CST 2022