As a one-liner I would prefer something like this: perl -nle 'print "\t"x($1-1),$2 if /^=head(\d)\s+(.*)/' /somepath/perlop.pod Or as a short program: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -l

# Call the program as follows:
#    perl toc.pl perlop
#    perl toc.pl Parse::RecDescent

my $podfile = `perldoc -l @ARGV[0]`;
exit if $?;
open POD, $podfile or die "$podfile: $!.\n";

while (<POD>) {
    print "    " x ($1-1), $2 if /^=head(\d)\s+(.*)/;
}

[download]
What do you think: should all lengthy Perl documentation have a table of contents?

Unfortunately, it is too late to add a table of contents as a requirement for Perl documentation. However, it shouldn't be difficult to extend the above methodology to read a pod file, generate a table of contents, add it to a copy of the original pod as a section after NAME and redirect it to pod2text.

--
John.

In reply to Re: Who's afraid of the manual? by jmcnamara
in thread Who's afraid of the manual? by Juerd

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