Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Navigating the Standard Manpages

In the Beginning (of Perl, that is, back in 1987), the perl manpage was a terse document, filling about 24 pages when typeset and printed. For example, its section on regular expressions was only two paragraphs long. (That was enough, if you knew egrep.) In some ways, nearly everything has changed since then. Counting the standard documentation, the various utilities, the per-platform porting information, and the scads of standard modules, we now have thousands of typeset pages of documentation spread across many separate manpages. (And that’s not counting any CPAN modules you install, which is likely to be quite a few.)

But in other ways, nothing has changed: there’s still a perl manpage kicking around. And it’s still the right place to start when you don’t know where to start. The difference is that once you arrive, you can’t just stop there. Perl documentation is no longer a cottage industry; it’s a supermall with hundreds of stores. When you walk in the door, you need to find the you are here to figure out which shop or department store sells what you’re shopping for. Of course, once you get familiar with the mall, you’ll usually know right where to go.

A few of the store signs you’ll see are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Selected Perl manpages

Manpage	Covers
perl	What perl manpages are available
perldata	Data types
perlsyn	Syntax
perlop	Operators and precedence
perlre	Regular expressions
perlvar	Predefined variables
perlsub	Subroutines ...