Ubuntu Manpage: pod2man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input

Provided by: perl_5.30.0-9ubuntu0.5_amd64

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] [--release=version] [--section=manext]
           [--quotes=quotes] [--lquote=quote] [--rquote=quote]
           [--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 for the ".TH" macro to string. The default is "User Contributed Perl
Documentation", but also see --official below.

-d string, --date=string
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).

--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.

--lquote=quote
--rquote=quote
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.

-n name, --name=name
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.

--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. 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.

-r version, --release=version
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.

-s string, --section=string
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 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.

-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.

AUTHOR

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

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2018 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.