pod2man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input
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
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.
Sets the centered page header for the .TH macro to string. The
default is "User Contributed Perl Documentation", but also see
--official below.
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).
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.
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.
Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to CB
. Only matters
for troff(1) output.
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.
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.
Print out usage information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Set the default header to indicate that this page is part of the standard Perl release, if --center is not also given.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Print out the name of each output file as it is being generated.
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.
If pod2man fails with errors, see Pod::Man and Pod::Simple for information about what those errors might mean.
- 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.
Lots of this documentation is duplicated from Pod::Man.
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.
Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>, based very heavily on the original pod2man by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen.
Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 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.