Don't you have pod2html in your perl/bin directory?

yes, but this produces html. it is not a viewer. its output will need to be stored somewhere. not sure if local cross-references to other local pod files in the std docs will work, either. then the html needs to be loaded into a browser.

all of this is not a big deal, but its not out-of-the-box and there are no extra features here.

I guess I've been spoilt by the AS distribution which builds all the html for me at install time. Both for the standard distribution and for stuff I install later. I find this infinitely more useful & usable than the perldoc, man or similar viewers.

My browser is always open, and the perl doc tree is always open in a pinned tab within it. It just doesn't make sense to me to have to reparse every module each time I want to look at the pod, when it can be done once at install time and be an Alt-tab or two away at all times.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

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In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

Better perldoc on Windows

Pod::Server

tkpod

Pod::POM::Web

podview

Pod::Webserver

Perldoc::Server

is there a man equivalent for perl that's searchable?

CPAN::Search::Lite - setup and maintain a searchable CPAN database

Perldoc::Server - Local Perl documentation server

Perldoc::Search - Index and Search local Perl Documentation

App::Perldoc::Search - implementation for perldoc-search

Pod::Index - Index and search PODs using X<> entries.

Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch convert several Pod files to several HTML files

% mkdir out_html
% perl -MPod::Simple::HTMLBatch -e Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch::go @INC out
+_html
  (to convert the pod from Perl's @INC
   files under the directory ../htmlversion)
[download]

perldoc is totally broken under OSX the way it ships. first, /usr/bin/pod2man is not even executable. once this is fixed, it produces a blank file with some /var folders as the file name.

$ uname -a
Darwin cowshed-door.barnyard.co.uk 8.11.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1
+: Wed Oct 10 18:23:28 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.25.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i38
+6 i386
$ ls -l /usr/bin/pod2man 
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  19545 Jan 13  2006 /usr/bin/pod2man
[download]

Bzzt, wrong. I've not ever touched that file, and it's executable.

Same thing for me on i386-apple-darwin10.5.0 sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/pod2* made perldoc working too. The problem came probably after installing a few things with PERL CPAN. I got the problem while installing fink with update with cvs.

Some versions of OS X (Lion for instance) ship with multiple versions of perl installed, and with every perl utility available as utility#.## (eg pod2man5.12). This is actually documented in the perl(1) man page.

There is also an unexecutable script with the utility name, no version suffix, which can be run with perlutility which emits a message about the multiversion support.

Instead of setting the executable bit on those scripts, replace them with an alias to the version you want (eg: rm /usr/bin/pod2man; ln -s /usr/bin/pod2man5.12 /usr/bin/pod2man. You may also need to change the permissions of the alias (eg: chmod -h o+rx /usr/bin/pod2man). Plus it goes without saying that you'll need to do all of this with admin permissions.