PODCHECKER(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PODCHECKER(1)

# [NAME](#NAME)

podchecker - check the syntax of POD format documentation files

# [SYNOPSIS](#SYNOPSIS)

**podchecker** \[**-help**] \[**-man**] \[**-(no)warnings**] \[*file* ...]

# [OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS](#OPTIONS_AND_ARGUMENTS)

[**-help**](#help)

Print a brief help message and exit.

[**-man**](#man)

Print the manual page and exit.

[**-quiet**](#quiet)

Do not print a success message.

[**-warnings** **-nowarnings**](#warnings)

Turn on/off printing of warnings. Repeating **-warnings** increases the warning level, i.e. more warnings are printed. Currently increasing to level two causes flagging of unescaped "<,>" characters.

[*file*](#file)

The pathname of a POD file to syntax-check (defaults to standard input).

# [DESCRIPTION](#DESCRIPTION)

**podchecker** will read the given input files looking for POD syntax errors in the POD documentation and will print any errors it find to STDERR. At the end, it will print a status message indicating the number of errors found.

Directories are ignored, an appropriate warning message is printed.

**podchecker** invokes the **podchecker()** function exported by **Pod::Checker** Please see "**podchecker()**" in Pod::Checker for more details.

# [RETURN VALUE](#RETURN_VALUE)

**podchecker** returns a 0 (zero) exit status if all specified POD files are ok.

# [ERRORS](#ERRORS)

**podchecker** returns the exit status 1 if at least one of the given POD files has syntax errors.

The status 2 indicates that at least one of the specified files does not contain *any* POD commands.

Status 1 overrides status 2. If you want unambiguous results, call **podchecker** with one single argument only.

# [SEE ALSO](#SEE_ALSO)

Pod::Simple and Pod::Checker

# [AUTHORS](#AUTHORS)

Please report bugs using <http://rt.cpan.org>.

Brad Appleton <bradapp@enteract.com>, Marek Rouchal <marekr@cpan.org>

Based on code for [**Pod::Text::pod2text(1)**](/man/os/perl/Pod::Text::pod2text.1) written by Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>

2026-10-26 perl v5.44.0

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Document: podchecker(1) from perl 5.44.0-r3 (Chainguard OS)
Source: https://github.com/Perl/perl5.git