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(Convert POD data to formatted *roff input)
pod2man [--center=string] [--date=string] [--encoding=encoding] [--errors=style] [--fixed=font] [--fixedbold=font] [--fixeditalic=font] [--fixedbolditalic=font] [--guesswork=rule[,rule...]] [--name=name] [--nourls] [--official] [--release=version] [--section=manext] [--quotes=quotes] [--lquote=quote] [--rquote=quote] [--stderr] [--utf8] [--verbose] [input [output] ...]
pod2man --help
pod2man is a wrapper script around the Pod::Man module, 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).
By default (on non-EBCDIC systems), pod2man outputs UTF-8 manual pages.
Its output should work with the man program on systems that use groff
(most Linux distributions) or mandoc (most BSD variants), but may result in
mangled output on older UNIX systems. To choose a different, possibly more
backward-compatible output mangling on such systems, use --encoding=roff
(the default in earlier Pod::Man versions). See the --encoding option and
"ENCODING" in Pod::Man for more details.
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 for details.
For specific details and caveats about the translation from POD to *roff, see "CAVEATS" in Pod::Man.
Each option is annotated with the version of podlators in which that option was added with its current meaning.
[1.00] Sets the centered page header for the .TH macro to string. The
default is User Contributed Perl Documentation, but also see --official
below.
[4.00] Set the left-hand footer string for the .TH macro to string. By
default, the first of POD_MAN_DATE, SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, the modification date
of the input file, or the current date (if input comes from STDIN) will be
used, and the date will be in UTC. See "CLASS METHODS" in Pod::Man for more
details.
[5.00] Specifies the encoding of the output. encoding must be an encoding recognized by the Encode module (see Encode::Supported). The default on non-EBCDIC systems is UTF-8.
If the output contains characters that cannot be represented in this encoding,
that is an error that will be reported as configured by the --errors
option. If error handling is other than die, the unrepresentable character
will be replaced with the Encode substitution character (normally ?).
If the encoding option is set to the special value groff (the default on
EBCDIC systems), or if the Encode module is not available and the encoding is
set to anything other than roff (see below), Pod::Man will translate all
non-ASCII characters to \[uNNNN] Unicode escapes. These are not
traditionally part of the *roff language, but are supported by groff and
mandoc and thus by the majority of manual page processors in use today.
If encoding is set to the special value roff, pod2man will do its
historic transformation of (some) ISO 8859-1 characters into *roff escapes
that may be adequate in troff and may be readable (if ugly) in nroff. This
was the default behavior of versions of pod2man before 5.00. With this
encoding, all other non-ASCII characters will be replaced with X. It may
be required for very old troff and nroff implementations that do not support
UTF-8, but its representation of any non-ASCII character is very poor and
often specific to European languages. Its use is discouraged.
WARNING: The input encoding of the POD source is independent from the output
encoding, and setting this option does not affect the interpretation of the
POD input. Unless your POD source is US-ASCII, its encoding should be
declared with the =encoding command in the source. If this is not done,
Pod::Simple will will attempt to guess the encoding and may be successful if
it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will produce warnings. See perlpod(1) for
more information.
[2.5.0] 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.
[1.0] The fixed-width font to use for verbatim text and code. Defaults to
CW. Some systems may want CR instead. Only matters for troff
output.
[1.0] Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to CB. Only matters
for troff output.
[1.0] Italic version of the fixed-width font (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 output.
[1.0] Bold italic (in theory, probably oblique in practice) 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 output.
[5.00] By default, pod2man applies some default formatting rules based on guesswork and regular expressions that are intended to make writing Perl documentation easier and require less explicit markup. These rules may not always be appropriate, particularly for documentation that isn't about Perl. This option allows turning all or some of it off.
The special rule all enables all guesswork. This is also the default for
backward compatibility reasons. The special rule none disables all
guesswork. Otherwise, the value of this option should be a comma-separated
list of one or more of the following keywords:
Convert function references like foo() to bold even if they have no markup.
The function name accepts valid Perl characters for function names (including
:), and the trailing parentheses must be present and empty.
Make the first part (before the parentheses) of man page references like
foo(1) bold even if they have no markup. The section must be a single
number optionally followed by lowercase letters.
If no guesswork is enabled, any text enclosed in C<> is surrounded by double quotes in nroff (terminal) output unless the contents are already quoted. When this guesswork is enabled, quote marks will also be suppressed for Perl variables, function names, function calls, numbers, and hex constants.
Convert Perl variable names to a fixed-width font even if they have no markup. This transformation will only be apparent in troff output, or some other output format (unlike nroff terminal output) that supports fixed-width fonts.
Any unknown guesswork name is silently ignored (for potential future compatibility), so be careful about spelling.
[1.00] Print out usage information.
[1.00] 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.
[5.00] Add commands telling groff that the input file is in the given
language. The value of this setting must be a language abbreviation for which
groff provides supplemental configuration, such as ja (for Japanese) or
zh (for Chinese).
This adds:
.mso <language>.tmac
.hla <language>
to the start of the file, which configure correct line breaking for the specified language. Without these commands, groff may not know how to add proper line breaks for Chinese and Japanese text if the man page is installed into the normal man page directory, such as /usr/share/man.
On many systems, this will be done automatically if the man page is installed into a language-specific man page directory, such as /usr/share/man/zh_CN. In that case, this option is not required.
Unfortunately, the commands added with this option are specific to groff and will not work with other troff and nroff implementations.
[4.08] 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.
[4.08] 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 manual pages is for the title to be in all-uppercase, even if the command isn't. (Perl modules traditionally use mixed case for the manual page title, however.)
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.
[2.5.0] 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.
[1.00] Set the default header to indicate that this page is part of the standard Perl release, if --center is not also given.
[4.00] 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.
[1.00] 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.
[1.00] 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.
[2.1.3] 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.
[2.1.0] This option used to tell pod2man to produce UTF-8 output. Since this is now the default as of version 5.00, it is ignored and does nothing.
[1.11] 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.
Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>, based on the original pod2man by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen.
Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2019, 2022-2024 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)
The man page documenting the an macro set is usually either man(7) or
man(5) depending on the 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.
| < POD Style Guide | Russ Allbery > Software > podlators | pod2text Manual Page > |