That's interesting that you're getting different results on another CentOS 6 system using the same POD input. Although my situation seems to have a resolution from the discussion with pryrt, I don't know how to explain why you're getting different results. Yes, that posted POD was literally one of the cases in which I was getting an error 1 status exit from the "perldoc -F" command. When I added a =head1 element to the file, that was the main thing that resolved the error. The file processes OK with or without the =pod element, but the lack of a =head1 or something similar seems to trigger the error. I also had to fix the options to my PERLDOC_PAGER in order to see the output without the pager exiting immediately.
Edit 1
Oh... one possibility might be that you're saving the text as a .pod file, whereas I had it in a .pl file. Trying it out over here... yes, if I rename my file from .pl to .pod, then perldoc runs OK on it, without the =head1 element. Very interesting.