PODCHECKER(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 PODCHECKER ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because today we're checking your POD files and honestly? it's giving syntax police but make it cute 🎀

this is the manual page for podchecker, part of the Perl Programmers Reference Guide. it's literally just here to check the syntax of POD format documentation files. that's it. that's the gig. 👑

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

podchecker [-help] [-man] [-(no)warnings] [file ...]

💅 OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS 💅

  • -help — prints a lil brief help message and then dips out. exit stage left. 🚪
  • -man — prints the manual page and exits. iconic behaviour, honestly.
  • -quiet — do not print a success message. sometimes you just don't need the praise and that's valid 🙈
  • -warnings, -nowarnings — turns printing of warnings on / off. and listen, repeating -warnings increases the warning level, meaning more warnings get printed. currently, cranking it up to level two causes unescaped "<,>" characters to get flagged. so like, level two is where it starts noticing things 👀
  • file — the pathname of a POD file to syntax-check. if you don't give one, it defaults to standard input. no pressure or anything 💖

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so podchecker will read the input files you gave it, hunting for POD syntax errors in the POD documentation, and it prints any errors it finds to STDERR. at the end, it prints a status message telling you how many errors turned up.

directories? ignored. it's not gonna touch them, but it will print an appropriate warning message about it. respectfully declining, basically 💀

podchecker invokes the podchecker() function exported by Pod::Checker. if you want more details, please see "podchecker()" in Pod::Checker.

🫶 RETURN VALUE 🫶

podchecker returns a 0 (zero) exit status if all the specified POD files are ok. clean. flawless. no notes. ✨

😭 ERRORS 😭

podchecker returns the exit status 1 if at least one of the given POD files has syntax errors.

the status 2 means at least one of the specified files doesn't contain any POD commands at all. like, hello? where's the POD??

🚨 and here's the tea: status 1 overrides status 2. so if you want unambiguous results, call podchecker with one single argument only. one file, one vibe, one truth. periodt. 💅

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

Pod::Simple and Pod::Checker

🌈 AUTHORS 🌈

please report bugs using <http://rt.cpan.org>. (ngl, do it, they wanna hear from you 🫶)

Brad Appleton <bradapp@enteract.com>, Marek Rouchal <marekr@cpan.org>

based on code for Pod::Text::pod2text(1) written by Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>

and that's the whole page, bestie! this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, filed under PODCHECKER(1perl). go forth and check your POD syntax, you absolute main character 🌟💖

📦 where this page comes from