perldoc individual manpage search

mp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Programming Perl (3rd edition) claims on page xxvii:

...as of the 5.6.1 release of Perl, each main Perl manpage has its own search and display capability. You can search individual pages by using the name of the manpage as the command and passing a Perl regular expression ... as the search pattern.
% perlop comma
% perlfunc split
% perlvar ARGV
% perldiag 'assigned to typeglob'

This does not work (perlop, perlfunc, etc. do not exist) on the several installations of v5.6.1 that I have tried. Has anyone gotten this to work?

The book's errata page on O'Reilly's site has this listed under the link Unconfirmed error reports and comments from readers but has no further information on it.

Comment on perldoc individual manpage search

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Re: perldoc individual manpage search by hiseldl (Priest) on Oct 02, 2002 at 17:46 UTC
Try running `perldoc`. I am running AS Perl v5.6.1 and running perldoc works for that distro. Example: `perldoc perldoc perldoc -f split` [download] -- hiseldl What time is it? It's Camel Time!	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: perldoc individual manpage search by mp (Deacon) on Oct 02, 2002 at 18:16 UTC
Thank you. I am aware of perldoc and use it very frequently. However Programming Perl v3 describes some search capability beyond what perldoc does: ability to search any perl manpage for a regexp (not just perlfaq, perlfunc, and perltoc) using the commands shown above rather than using perldoc directly. ability to search the entire perl manual, including all headers, descriptions, and examples for any instance of the string, using perlhelp These features would be quite helpful, if they worked. It might not be too difficult to modify perldoc to implement these features, but if the wheel already exists...??? In searching a bit more for this, I found this thread (this post, specifically) in comp.lang.perl.misc that explains what might have happened in regards to this feature. (If you have trouble with the above link, go here (or manually search Google groups for: programming perl dated info)) then visit the thread entitled "Programming Perl Q Certain info dated". Does anyone have any conclusive information about this? Update: Added the following A bit more research turned up this recent posting, which states that there is an alpha version, but the link appears to be dead (at least right now).	[reply]


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