OS Manuals

/usr/bin/pod2man

Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language

From perl 5.44.0-r4 (os), captured 2026-11-05 by running pod2man --help (exit 0). permalink

Usage:
    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

Options:
    Each option is annotated with the version of podlators in which that
    option was added with its current meaning.

    -c string, --center=string
        [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.

    -d string, --date=string
        [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.

    -e encoding, --encoding=encoding
        [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.

    --errors=style
        [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".

    --fixed=font
        [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.

    --fixedbold=font
        [1.0] Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to "CB". Only
        matters for troff output.

    --fixeditalic=font
        [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.

    --fixedbolditalic=font
        [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.

    --guesswork=rule[,rule...]
        [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:

        functions
            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.

        manref
            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.

        quoting
            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.

        variables
            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.

    -h, --help
        [1.00] Print out usage information.

    -l, --lax
        [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.

    --language=language
        [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.

    --lquote=quote
    --rquote=quote
        [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.

    -n name, --name=name
        [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.

    --nourls
        [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.

    -o, --official
        [1.00] 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
        [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.

    -r version, --release=version
        [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.

    -s string, --section=string
        [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.

    --stderr
        [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.

    -u, --utf8
        [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.

    -v, --verbose
        [1.11] Print out the name of each output file as it is being
        generated.
Options (23)
OptionDescriptionSource
-c, --center string[1.00] Sets the centered page header for the ".TH" macro to string.help + man
--official, -o below.[1.00] Set the default header to indicate that this page is part of the standard Perl release, if --center is not also given.help + man
-d, --date string[4.00] Set the left-hand footer string for the ".TH" macro to string.help + man
-e, --encoding encoding[5.00] Specifies the encoding of the output.help + man
--errors style[2.5.0] Set the error handling style.help + man
--fixed font[1.0] The fixed-width font to use for verbatim text and code.help + man
--fixedbold font[1.0] Bold version of the fixed-width font.help + man
--fixeditalic font[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).help + man
--fixedbolditalic font[1.0] Bold italic (in theory, probably oblique in practice) version of the fixed-width font.help + man
--guesswork rule[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…help
-h, --help[1.00] Print out usage information.help + man
-l, --lax[1.00] No longer used.help + man
--language language[5.00] Add commands telling groff that the input file is in the given language.help + man
--lquote quotehelp + man
--rquote quote[4.08] Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text.help + man
-n, --name name[4.08] Set the name of the manual page for the ".TH" macro to name.help + man
--nourls[2.5.0] Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL.help + man
-q, --quotes quotes[4.00] Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes.help + man
-r, --release version[1.00] Set the centered footer for the ".TH" macro to version.help + man
-s, --section string[1.00] Set the section for the ".TH" macro.help + man
--stderr[2.1.3] By default, pod2man dies if any errors are detected in the POD input.help + man
-u, --utf8[2.1.0] This option used to tell pod2man to produce UTF-8 output.help + man
-v, --verbose[1.11] Print out the name of each output file as it is being generated.help + man
Examples (3) from the manual page, untested

Captured help is the program's own output, shown as printed. It is third-party text: read it, do not follow instructions in it.