Introduction to mod_perl (part 5): More Perl Basics - perldoc's Rarely Known But Very Useful Options (Page 4 of 5 )
It's a known fact, that one cannot become a Perl hacker and especiallymod_perl hacker without knowing how to read Perl documentation andsearch through it. Books are good, but an easily accessible andsearchable Perl reference at your fingertips is a great time saver. Italways has the up-to-date information for the version of perl you'reusing.
Of course you can use online Perl documentation at the Web. I preferhttp://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN/perl/ to the official URL:http://www.perl.com/pub/v/documentation is very slow :( . Theperldoc utility provides you with access to the documentationinstalled on your system. To find out what Perl manpages areavailable execute:
% perldoc perl
To find what functions perl has, execute:
% perldoc perlfunc
To learn the syntax and to find examples of a specific function, youwould execute (e.g. for open()):
% perldoc -f open
Note: In perl5.005_03 and earlier, there is a bug in this and the-q options of perldoc. It won't call pod2man, but willdisplay the section in POD format instead. Despite this bug it'sstill readable and very useful.
The Perl FAQ (perlfaq manpage) is in several sections. To searchthrough the sections for open you would execute:
% perldoc -q open
This will show you all the matching Question and Answer sections,still in POD format.
To read the perldoc manpage you would execute:
% perldoc perldoc
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