1POD2MAN(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation POD2MAN(1)
2
6 pod2man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input
7
9 pod2man [--center=string] [--date=string] [--errors=style]
10 [--fixed=font] [--fixedbold=font] [--fixeditalic=font]
11 [--fixedbolditalic=font] [--name=name] [--nourls]
12 [--official] [--release=version] [--section=manext]
13 [--quotes=quotes] [--lquote=quote] [--rquote=quote]
14 [--stderr] [--utf8] [--verbose] [input [output] ...]
15 pod2man --help
17
19 pod2man is a front-end for Pod::Man, using it to generate *roff input
20 from POD source. The resulting *roff code is suitable for display on a
21 terminal using nroff(1), normally via man(1), or printing using
22 troff(1).
23 input is the file to read for POD source (the POD can be embedded in
25 code). If input isn't given, it defaults to "STDIN". output, if
26 given, is the file to which to write the formatted output. If output
27 isn't given, the formatted output is written to "STDOUT". Several POD
28 files can be processed in the same pod2man invocation (saving module
29 load and compile times) by providing multiple pairs of input and output
30 files on the command line.
31 --section, --release, --center, --date, and --official can be used to
33 set the headers and footers to use; if not given, Pod::Man will assume
34 various defaults. See below or Pod::Man for details.
35 pod2man assumes that your *roff formatters have a fixed-width font
37 named "CW". If yours is called something else (like "CR"), use --fixed
38 to specify it. This generally only matters for troff output for
39 printing. Similarly, you can set the fonts used for bold, italic, and
40 bold italic fixed-width output.
41 Besides the obvious pod conversions, Pod::Man, and therefore pod2man
43 also takes care of formatting func(), func(n), and simple variable
44 references like $foo or @bar so you don't have to use code escapes for
45 them; complex expressions like $fred{'stuff'} will still need to be
46 escaped, though. It also translates dashes that aren't used as hyphens
47 into en dashes, makes long dashes--like this--into proper em dashes,
48 fixes "paired quotes," and takes care of several other troff-specific
49 tweaks. See Pod::Man for complete information.
50
52 -c string, --center=string
53 Sets the centered page header for the ".TH" macro to string. The
54 default is "User Contributed Perl Documentation", but also see
55 --official below.
56 -d string, --date=string
58 Set the left-hand footer string for the ".TH" macro to string. By
59 default, the modification date of the input file will be used, or
60 the current date if input comes from "STDIN", and will be based on
61 UTC (so that the output will be reproducible regardless of local
62 time zone).
63 --errors=style
65 Set the error handling style. "die" says to throw an exception on
66 any POD formatting error. "stderr" says to report errors on
67 standard error, but not to throw an exception. "pod" says to
68 include a POD ERRORS section in the resulting documentation
69 summarizing the errors. "none" ignores POD errors entirely, as
70 much as possible.
71 The default is "die".
73 --fixed=font
75 The fixed-width font to use for verbatim text and code. Defaults
76 to "CW". Some systems may want "CR" instead. Only matters for
77 troff(1) output.
78 --fixedbold=font
80 Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to "CB". Only
81 matters for troff(1) output.
82 --fixeditalic=font
84 Italic version of the fixed-width font (actually, something of a
85 misnomer, since most fixed-width fonts only have an oblique
86 version, not an italic version). Defaults to "CI". Only matters
87 for troff(1) output.
88 --fixedbolditalic=font
90 Bold italic (probably actually oblique) version of the fixed-width
91 font. Pod::Man doesn't assume you have this, and defaults to "CB".
92 Some systems (such as Solaris) have this font available as "CX".
93 Only matters for troff(1) output.
94 -h, --help
96 Print out usage information.
97 -l, --lax
99 No longer used. pod2man used to check its input for validity as a
100 manual page, but this should now be done by podchecker(1) instead.
101 Accepted for backward compatibility; this option no longer does
102 anything.
103 --lquote=quote
105 --rquote=quote
106 Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text. --lquote sets the
107 left quote mark and --rquote sets the right quote mark. Either may
108 also be set to the special value "none", in which case no quote
109 mark is added on that side of C<> text (but the font is still
110 changed for troff output).
111 Also see the --quotes option, which can be used to set both quotes
113 at once. If both --quotes and one of the other options is set,
114 --lquote or --rquote overrides --quotes.
115 -n name, --name=name
117 Set the name of the manual page for the ".TH" macro to name.
118 Without this option, the manual name is set to the uppercased base
119 name of the file being converted unless the manual section is 3, in
120 which case the path is parsed to see if it is a Perl module path.
121 If it is, a path like ".../lib/Pod/Man.pm" is converted into a name
122 like "Pod::Man". This option, if given, overrides any automatic
123 determination of the name.
124 Although one does not have to follow this convention, be aware that
126 the convention for UNIX man pages for commands is for the man page
127 title to be in all-uppercase, even if the command isn't.
128 This option is probably not useful when converting multiple POD
130 files at once.
131 When converting POD source from standard input, the name will be
133 set to "STDIN" if this option is not provided. Providing this
134 option is strongly recommended to set a meaningful manual page
135 name.
136 --nourls
138 Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are
139 formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL. In other
140 words:
141 L<foo|http://example.com/>
143 is formatted as:
145 foo <http://example.com/>
147 This flag, if given, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given,
149 so this example would be formatted as just "foo". This can produce
150 less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are not particularly
151 important.
152 -o, --official
154 Set the default header to indicate that this page is part of the
155 standard Perl release, if --center is not also given.
156 -q quotes, --quotes=quotes
158 Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes. If
159 quotes is a single character, it is used as both the left and right
160 quote. Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of the
161 string is used as the left quote and the second is used as the
162 right quote.
163 quotes may also be set to the special value "none", in which case
165 no quote marks are added around C<> text (but the font is still
166 changed for troff output).
167 Also see the --lquote and --rquote options, which can be used to
169 set the left and right quotes independently. If both --quotes and
170 one of the other options is set, --lquote or --rquote overrides
171 --quotes.
172 -r version, --release=version
174 Set the centered footer for the ".TH" macro to version. By
175 default, this is set to the version of Perl you run pod2man under.
176 Setting this to the empty string will cause some *roff
177 implementations to use the system default value.
178 Note that some system "an" macro sets assume that the centered
180 footer will be a modification date and will prepend something like
181 "Last modified: ". If this is the case for your target system, you
182 may want to set --release to the last modified date and --date to
183 the version number.
184 -s string, --section=string
186 Set the section for the ".TH" macro. The standard section
187 numbering convention is to use 1 for user commands, 2 for system
188 calls, 3 for functions, 4 for devices, 5 for file formats, 6 for
189 games, 7 for miscellaneous information, and 8 for administrator
190 commands. There is a lot of variation here, however; some systems
191 (like Solaris) use 4 for file formats, 5 for miscellaneous
192 information, and 7 for devices. Still others use 1m instead of 8,
193 or some mix of both. About the only section numbers that are
194 reliably consistent are 1, 2, and 3.
195 By default, section 1 will be used unless the file ends in ".pm",
197 in which case section 3 will be selected.
198 --stderr
200 By default, pod2man dies if any errors are detected in the POD
201 input. If --stderr is given and no --errors flag is present,
202 errors are sent to standard error, but pod2man does not abort.
203 This is equivalent to "--errors=stderr" and is supported for
204 backward compatibility.
205 -u, --utf8
207 By default, pod2man produces the most conservative possible *roff
208 output to try to ensure that it will work with as many different
209 *roff implementations as possible. Many *roff implementations
210 cannot handle non-ASCII characters, so this means all non-ASCII
211 characters are converted either to a *roff escape sequence that
212 tries to create a properly accented character (at least for troff
213 output) or to "X".
214 This option says to instead output literal UTF-8 characters. If
216 your *roff implementation can handle it, this is the best output
217 format to use and avoids corruption of documents containing non-
218 ASCII characters. However, be warned that *roff source with
219 literal UTF-8 characters is not supported by many implementations
220 and may even result in segfaults and other bad behavior.
221 Be aware that, when using this option, the input encoding of your
223 POD source should be properly declared unless it's US-ASCII.
224 Pod::Simple will attempt to guess the encoding and may be
225 successful if it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will warn, which by
226 default results in a pod2man failure. Use the "=encoding" command
227 to declare the encoding. See perlpod(1) for more information.
228 -v, --verbose
230 Print out the name of each output file as it is being generated.
231
233 As long as all documents processed result in some output, even if that
234 output includes errata (a "POD ERRORS" section generated with
235 "--errors=pod"), pod2man will exit with status 0. If any of the
236 documents being processed do not result in an output document, pod2man
237 will exit with status 1. If there are syntax errors in a POD document
238 being processed and the error handling style is set to the default of
239 "die", pod2man will abort immediately with exit status 255.
240
242 If pod2man fails with errors, see Pod::Man and Pod::Simple for
243 information about what those errors might mean.
244
246 pod2man program > program.1
247 pod2man SomeModule.pm /usr/perl/man/man3/SomeModule.3
248 pod2man --section=7 note.pod > note.7
249 If you would like to print out a lot of man page continuously, you
251 probably want to set the C and D registers to set contiguous page
252 numbering and even/odd paging, at least on some versions of man(7).
253 troff -man -rC1 -rD1 perl.1 perldata.1 perlsyn.1 ...
255 To get index entries on "STDERR", turn on the F register, as in:
257 troff -man -rF1 perl.1
259 The indexing merely outputs messages via ".tm" for each major page,
261 section, subsection, item, and any "X<>" directives. See Pod::Man for
262 more details.
263
265 Lots of this documentation is duplicated from Pod::Man.
266
268 Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>, based very heavily on the original pod2man
269 by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen.
270
272 Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2019 Russ Allbery
273 <rra@cpan.org>
274 This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
276 under the same terms as Perl itself.
277
279 Pod::Man, Pod::Simple, man(1), nroff(1), perlpod(1), podchecker(1),
280 perlpodstyle(1), troff(1), man(7)
281 The man page documenting the an macro set may be man(5) instead of
283 man(7) on your system.
284 The current version of this script is always available from its web
286 site at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also
287 part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
288perl v5.32.1 2021-01-27 POD2MAN(1)