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
dashesΩ-like thisΩ-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.
Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>, based very heavily on the original pod2man by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen.
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.
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 <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.