Wanting to be helpful, I wrote some POD for the shiny new module and CGI that I'd created. All appeared well until the mysterious error
Missing right curly or square bracket at foo.pl line 281, at end of line\nsyntax error at foo.pl line 281, at EOF\n
started appearing in the error log.
I checked with IRC, I ran the source code through perltidy (no changes -- it was already clean), I paged through my dog-eared Camel. Finally I was down to thought experiments. What had I changed or added recently? Why, nothing but POD, your honour, honest.
However, being an irregular PODder, I wasn't quite up on my syntax, and I had ended both blobs of POD with the =end tag and not a =cut tag. Sure enough, a quick check with Test::Pod confirmed the dastardly error.
So, if this is news to you, please turn to page 949 of your Camel and add the following after the second item on the page:
Also check your POD -- you may be missing a =cut at the end of your file!
Thank you. Class dismissed.
Alex / talexb / Toronto
"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds
Update: And podchecker can also be used to check that the POD's OK, as Anonymonk points out.