The '-exitval' lets pod2usage exit the programm for you.

Better yet, even without passing -exitval pod2usage will exit for you as it does this by default. If for some reason you do not want pod2usage to exit you need to pass in the 'NOEXIT' string value:

pod2usage (-verbose => 1, -exitval => 'NOEXIT');
print "This line will print only because we used 'NOEXIT'.\n";
pod2usage (-verbose => 1);
print "This line will never be reached.\n";
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