alias "perlfunc=perldoc -f"
perlfunc split
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%perldoc perlop comma
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Also read %perldoc perldoc.

I am interested at finding more about the OS differences when it comes to accessing the documentation and whether the Camel book has really meant that the OP's original query was possible on an OS different from the Debian or XP as I feel intrigued too..

The implication in Programming Perl is that 'perlop', 'perlfunc', etc. are directly executable, not run as arguments to perldoc.

Furthermore,

$ perldoc perlop comma
No documentation found for "comma".
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... i.e. perldoc is trying to display the man pages for both 'perlop' and 'comma'.

perldoc -f works fine, and I'll probably use the alias suggested by cdarke.

I'm simply curious about why 'Programming Perl' says that I can search perl man pages using the name of the man page and a Perl regular expression, and then I can't.

As irrational as it sounds, I feel a little cheated... that seemed like a nice little shortcut, and I'm disappointed that the Camel book has led me to a non-existent feature.

Either someone has accidentally removed the perlfunc script, or this is a Debian bug. Some time ago, the Debian people decided that the perl documentation does not contain a sufficient license disclaimer, and so they removed the perl documentation from the perl package. Maybe your Debian version is affected. In that case, search for a perl documentation package.

Update: Nonsense, I mixed up perlfunc and perldoc. Sorry.

Alexander

package perlop;
use base qw(Term::Shell);

my $obj = perlop->new();
$obj->cmdloop;

use strict;
use warnings;

sub prompt_str {
    my $cwd = 'cwd';
    $cwd =~ s[^\Q$ENV{HOME}\E][~];
    "perlop> ";
}

sub run_comma {

    print <<"EOF";
    
Binary "," is the comma operator. In scalar context it evaluates its l
+eft argument, throws that value away, then evaluates its right argume
+nt and returns that value. This is just like C's comma operator.
In list context, it's just the list argument separator, and inserts bo
+th its arguments into the list. These arguments are also evaluated fr
+om left to right.
The => operator is a synonym for the comma except that it causes its l
+eft operand to be interpreted as a string if it begins with a letter 
+or underscore and is composed only of letters, digits and underscores
+. This includes operands that might otherwise be interpreted as opera
+tors, constants, single number v-strings or function calls. If in dou
+bt about this behaviour, the left operand can be quoted explicitly.
Otherwise, the => operator behaves exactly as the comma operator or li
+st argument separator, according to context.
EOF

    print "\n";
}
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but there's no similar switch for operators.

At the last YAPC::NA, there was a lightning talk from someone who's rewriting perlop so each operator gets its own section (currently many operators are grouped together, for instance +=, |=, >>=, etc). Once that work is done, adding another flag to perldoc to search for an operator would not be hard to implement.