echo $TERM gave me xterm-color, so I set it to xterm, but no change to output from perldoc perldoc resulted. I'm stuck between not knowing enough *n*x and not knowing enough MacOsX. MacOsX has an entirely non-*n*x way of setting properties of the terminal emulator given by the MacOsX program Terminal, but one can also affect things in the usual *n*x way. I haven't been able to find anything in MacOsX saying "set the properties of the terminal emulator to vt220", or anything similar. However, I don't have the time to go into it all, so I'm just going to leave matters in their current unsatisfactory state. At least, using the advice given here, I now have several ways of reading the output from perldoc, and also perdoc.org, and this has improved my relationship with perl. Thanks to everyone for this.