G'day jimw54321,

I have Perl v5.18.1 (I can't see any mention of changes to "perldoc" or "POD" in the latest, v5.18.2, perldelta). I have version 3.19 of Pod::Perldoc ("The guts of perldoc utility."). I'm on a completely different platform to you (Mac OS X): keep this in mind when reading the following.

I used to have a variety of problems with perldoc output which I fixed, after much trial and error, simply by adding this to my ~/.bash_profile (the equivalent on your OS may be ~/.profile [it's been quite a few years since I last worked on Solaris]):

PAGER="/usr/bin/less -R"
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This version of less seems to have the same options as me, check that -R means the same on your platform. Other options that may be worth trying are -r (which is similar to -R) and -s (to squeeze multiple, consecutive blank lines into one) which seems directly applicable to the problem you describe.

I don't have PERLDOC_PAGER or MANPAGER set. See perldoc - ENVIRONMENT for more information on pager settings and other less options.

In case it helps, here's my terminal characteristics (in the spoiler):