Re: perldoc -lf anomaly

You are combining two unrelated options.

What do you expect -lf to produce???

If anything this undefined behaviour should be rejected.

Anyway my best guess is that

-f is always (only) searching those two docs for snippets
-l is always listing the full path of parsed pods

So this "anomaly" makes IMHO perfect sense.

Edit

Usage demo

$ perldoc -l perldoc
/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/perl5/5.40.3/pod/perldoc.pod
$ perldoc -l Data::Dumper
/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/perl5/5.40.3/aarch64-android/Data/
+Dumper.pm
$ perldoc -f x
    x
    xor     These operators are documented in perlop.

$
[download]

Update

If your intention was to find every perldoc documenting a certain keyword :

I once wrote a script which will parse them all for X<keyword> tags.

See Perldoc Keyword Search (update3)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)

see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

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Re^2: perldoc -lf anomaly by Anonymous Monk on May 08, 2026 at 08:35 UTC
What do you expect -lf to produce??? I expected -lf to only return the name of the file "splice" was found in (perlfunc), instead of all the files it searched (perlfunc and perlop), but I guess it just doesn't work that way. > You are combining two unrelated options. Thanks for the clarification!	[reply]
Re^3: perldoc -lf anomaly (normality) by LanX (Saint) on May 09, 2026 at 14:05 UTC
For clarification, depending on the paths in the ENV perldoc might "find" different documents to generate doc. This is particular relevant if there is a NAME.pod file, forcing perldoc to ignore NAME.pl or NAME.pm. `-l` is supposed to show the path of the original files. In the case of `-f` both perlfunc and perlop must be "found" (and parsed) and -l will show their paths. This is actually relevant for debugging a messed up environment with multiple Perl installations. Edit According to `perldoc` the paths in PERL5LIB and PATH are searched for matching files. Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply] [d/l] [select]