I have heard first-time Perl programmers complain about the lack of documentation. This is understandable. They don’t know all the nifty stuff that comes with the standard Perl distribution.

Perl has a built-in documentation system referred to as perldoc. Perl modules are spiked with documentation about how to access the features of that module. This documentation is in the form of POD, or Plain Old Documentation. perldoc reads the POD, formats it into something more pleasing to the eye, and presents it to you in one form or another. I’ll be talking about the command-line perldoc utility, but the documentation is also transformed into HTML for the ActiveState Perl distribution, CPAN, and the perl.org perldoc repository. You may think you don’t need to worry about the perldoc command if you have ready access to the Internet, but it is still useful for finding exactly the details you need. Accessing documentation from the command line also means that you can view the details for the specific version that is installed on your machine. And really, these are my notes. You can stop reading any time you like.

Using perldoc is easy. Basic usage looks like this:

$ perldoc name-of-article-or-module

perldoc goes looking for the POD associated with the specific article or module. If it finds the POD, it formats it using a special program (usually nroff on Linux) and feeds the formatted text to a screen reader such as more or less. You can then search or page through the documentation using the normal commands for your screen reader.

It is as simple as that. I am going to look at some of the things perldoc can find for you, but first I need to make a small confession. All I’m doing is reviewing the documentation for perldoc itself. You can skip my rambling notes and get directly to the meat of the information with the following command:

$ perldoc perldoc

All the information you could possibly want is in the perldocs, or it should be. It may not always make sense the first time through. It will seem clear as a bell after a little practice. You can always refer to other sources until it starts to make sense.

$ perldoc perl

This provides a simple summary of perl’s command line options, a very brief summary of the available documentation, and a description of Perl itself. Use use this for the summary, but there is a more detailed summary available.

perldoc perltoc

This contains an extensive overview of the documentation available, including summaries, keywords, and a table of contents for each article. Look close enough and you will notice that there are several tutorials available.

Accessing information about a specific module

$ perldoc <module>

Viewing the source of that module

$ perldoc -m <module>

Finding out exactly which file contains the documentation

$ perldoc -l <module>

Accessing specific information

Perl built-in functions

$ perldoc -f <function>

The Perl FAQ

$ perldoc -q <search-expression>

perldoc will then look for a FAQ question containing the search expression, and present it to you.

Wrapping Up

These are the main features of perldoc that I use, but that’s not all there is to it. Check perldoc perldoc for all the gory details.

Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-01-26