Perl Hacks

Hack #2. Put Perldoc to Work

Do more than just read the documentation.

Perl has a huge amount of documentation available through the perldoc utility—and not just from the command line. These docs cover everything from the core language and tutorials through the standard library and any additional modules you install or even write. perldoc can do more, though.

Here are a few switches and options to increase your productivity.

Find Operator Documentation

The perlfunc document lists every built-in operator in the language in alphabetical order. If you need to know the order of arguments to substr( ), you could type perldoc perlfunc, and then search for the correct occurrence of substr.

Tip

In a decent pager, such as less on a Unix-like system, use the forward slash (/) to begin a search. Type the rest of the name and hit Enter to begin searching. Press n to find the next occurrence and N to find the previous one.

Why search yourself, though? perldoc's -f switch searches perlfunc for you, presenting only the documentation for the named operator. Type instead:

$ perldoc -f substr
            

The program will launch your favorite pager, showing only the documentation for substr. Handy.

Answer a FAQ

The Perl FAQ is a very useful piece of the core documentation, with a table of contents in perlfaq and nine other documents (perlfaq1 through perlfaq9) full of frequently asked questions and their answers.

Searching every document for your question, however, is more tedious than searching perlfunc. (Do skim ...