This small self-contained program, including a little pod at the end:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Pod::Usage;
pod2usage(-exitstatus => 0,
          -verbose => 99,
          -sections => 'ACTIONS/back.*',
          -noperldoc => 1);
__END__
=head1 ACTIONS

Para for actions.

=head2 backup I<pkg> B<please> dest

Para for backup.
[download]

gives me this unexpected output, with the marked-up "pkg" and "please" text on the head2 line missing:

  backup dest:                                                        
+        
    Para for backup.
[download]

I'm trying to use markup on a head2 line, and then select it with pod2usage's -section option. The marked-up text is omitted, though the regular head2 text comes out fine.

Perhaps this is beyond the scope of what pod2usage is intended to do, but I couldn't find anything either explicitly disallowing or allowing it in the Pod::Usage documentation, and the POD documentation does explicitly say that formatting codes are allowed on header lines.

Incidentally, the -noperldoc => 1 is there just to eliminate the possibility of interactions with pagers or the like. It doesn't actually change the behavior, so far as I can see.

This is only about the pod2usage() function. The output from the pod2text and pod2html utilities, for example, correctly includes the marked-up text (again, "pkg" and "please" in the above). (Well, The table of contents from the pod2html output just has the text without any actual markup ("pkg" rather than "<i>pkg</>"), but that seems fine.)

I tried enabling the use constant DEBUG => 7 in Pod/Simple/BlackBox.pm and could see that the markup got parsed and returned as nested lists (as expected). At what level the marked-up text gets elided, I could not discern without putting in lots more effort. So I thought I'd post here before going further.

This was on i686-linux with perl 5.20.1, compiled (with gcc 4.9.2) and installed from the original source. I tried a variety of older Perl versions, both distro-supplied and my compilations, with the same results (or, if old enough, -sections is not supported).

Thanks for any fixes, workarounds, or other clues. --karl

=head2 backup [--clean[=I<N>]] [--backupdir I<dir>] [--all | I<pkg>]..
+.
[download]