Learning Perl, Second Edition

Additional Resources

Perl Manpages

The online documentation for Perl, called manpages due to their UNIX origin, has been divided into separate sections so you can easily find what you are looking for without wading through hundreds of pages of text. Since the top-level manpage is simply called perl, the UNIX command man perl should take you to it.^[1] That page in turn directs you to more specific pages. For example, man perlre displays the manpage for Perl's regular expressions. The perldoc command may work when the man (1) command won't, especially on module documentation that your system administrator may not have felt comfortable installing with the ordinary manpages. On the other hand, your system administrator may have installed the Perl documentation in hypertext markup language (HTML) format, especially on systems other than UNIX. If all else fails, you can always retrieve the Perl documentation from CPAN; look for this information in Section P.4.

^[1] If you still get a humongous page when you do that, you're probably picking up the ancient Release 4 manpage. You may need to change your MANPATH environment variable.

Here are the principal manpages included with the 5.004 distribution of Perl:

Manpage	Topic
perl	Overview of documentation
perldelta	Changes since previous version
perlfaq	Frequently asked questions
perldata	Data structures
perlsyn	Syntax
perlop	Operators and precedence
perlre	Regular expressions
perlrun	Execution and options
perlfunc	Built-in functions
perlvar	Predefined variables ...