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POD2MAN(1)                        Perl Programmers Reference Guide                        POD2MAN(1)



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 AT 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, 2012-2019 Russ Allbery <rra AT cpan.org>

       This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms
       as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO
       Pod::Man, Pod::Simple, man(1), nroff(1), perlpod(1), podchecker(1), perlpodstyle(1),
       troff(1), man(7)

       The man page documenting the an macro set may be man(5) instead of man(7) on your system.

       The current version of this script is always available from its web site at
       <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>.  It is also part of the Perl core
       distribution as of 5.6.0.



perl v5.34.0                                 2025-07-25                                   POD2MAN(1)