# phpman > perldoc > podchecker

## NAME
    podchecker - check the syntax of POD format documentation files

## SYNOPSIS
    podchecker [-help] [-man] [[-(no)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/-/no/markdown)warnings] [*file* ...]

## OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS
    -help   Print a brief help message and exit.

    -man    Print the manual page and exit.

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

## 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](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/Pod%3A%3AChecker/markdown) Please see "podchecker()"
    in [Pod::Checker](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/Pod%3A%3AChecker/markdown) for more details.

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

## 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
    [Pod::Simple](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/Pod%3A%3ASimple/markdown) and [Pod::Checker](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/Pod%3A%3AChecker/markdown)

## 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](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/Pod%3A%3AText/markdown)::[pod2text(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/pod2text/1/markdown) written by Tom Christiansen <<tchrist@mox.perl.com>>