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in reply to Mysterious crash of perldoc

Hi Textorix,

perhaps you could try to run some other POD renderers on your source file, such as pod2html, pod2latex, or pod2text, etc. I think they are bundled with most or all of Perl installations. This might help you to figure out whether your POD is correct or not, or whether there is perhaps something wrong in your environment.

Or you could even try an on-line POD to HTML renderer: https://metacpan.org/pod2html.

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Re^2: Mysterious crash of perldoc
by Textorix (Acolyte) on Mar 15, 2019 at 00:30 UTC

    Hi Laurent_R,

    Thanks for your reply... especially about the online renderer... that looks useful!

    A resolution to the problem has been found--see update in the original post. It seems that perldoc will error out on a .pl or .pm file if some sort of paragraph starter other than =pod is not present, although podchecker does not flag this as invalid POD and no error occurs in perldoc if the file is a .pod file.

      I looked at the source code for Pod::Perldoc yesterday and was also surprised to see =head being treated special explicitly in the code. In particular, subroutine containspod opens a file and looks for m/^=head/. It feels to me like that ought to allow for any of the POD commands, but certainly =pod. Perhaps that would violate some aspect of the spec, though I haven't been able to find anything suggesting that POD has to contain a =head1 command.

      I don't know if this qualifies as a bug, or if it's intended behavior. It is a little surprising though.


      Dave