Try an echo $TERM at the same console, and see what pops out. My guess is that it is set to something that understands escape sequences (for bold, underline, colors, etc), but your terminal is not configured to understand those sequences.

By default (IIRC), unless your system is Windows, perl tries to use pod2man to format its output. The nroff program is then used to format the output as necessary to display on the type of terminal identified in the $TERM environment variable. If the variable and your current terminal capabilities do not match, you can see the output you are describing. Does man cat also display those escape sequences?

--MidLifeXis

In reply to Re: strange output characters from perldoc by MidLifeXis
in thread strange output characters from perldoc by dbae

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