POD2MAN(1)             Perl Programmers Reference Guide             POD2MAN(1)



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 to string.  The default is "User
           Contributed Perl Documentation", but also see --official below.

       -d string, --date=string
           Set the left-hand footer string to this value.  By default, the
           modification date of the input file will be used, or the current
           date if input comes from "STDIN".

       -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 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.

           Note that this option is probably not useful when converting
           multiple POD files at once.  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.

       --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; if quotes is two characters, the first character is used as
           the left quote and the second as the right quoted; and if quotes is
           four characters, the first two are used as the left quote and the
           second two 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, --release
           Set the centered footer.  By default, this is the version of Perl
           you run pod2man under.  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, you
           may want to set --release to the last modified date and --date to
           the version number.

       -s, --section
           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 must be properly declared unless it is US-ASCII or
           Latin-1.  POD input without an "=encoding" command will be assumed
           to be in Latin-1, and if it's actually in UTF-8, the output will be
           double-encoded.  See perlpod(1) for more information on the
           "=encoding" command.

       -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.

SEE ALSO
       Pod::Man, Pod::Simple, 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 <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>.  It is also
       part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.

AUTHOR
       Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>, based very heavily on the original
       pod2man by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
       Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 Russ
       Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>.

       This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.



perl v5.20.2                      2016-02-26                        POD2MAN(1)
