If perl works on your system but the
perldoc command does not, you may need to search
your system for it. It is installed with Perl by default, but
depending on the installation, it may not have been installed in a
standard executable directory. You can also fall back to using
man instead. pod pages are
typically converted to manpages when they are installed.
To get started, try the following command:
$ perldoc perl
This provides a basic description of Perl along with a list of the
Perl manual sections available. For instance, typing:
$ perldoc perlsec
will display the Perl security section. perldoc
has a number of options; you can get the usage of
perldoc this way:
$ perldoc perldoc
perldoc is very useful with modules. You can
view the extensive documentation for CGI.pm this way:
$ perldoc CGI
This sequence works for multiple-word modules:
$ perldoc Digest::MD5
Note that the requested module must be present;
perldoc does not fetch documentation from CPAN. In
addition to package names, you can also supply a filename to
perldoc; this allows you to view the documentation
for a module before it is installed:
$perldoc ./MD5.pm
pod is typically stored within
.pm files, although separate
.pod files are possible.