CHAPTER 79. PERLDOC 79.4. SECURITY -X PageName | ModuleName | ProgramName -n some-formatter -r -i -V 79.4 SECURITY 79.5 ENVIRONMENT 79.6 AUTHOR 1258 Past contributors are: Kenneth Albanowski < kjahds@kjahds.com > , Andy Dougherty < doughera@lafcol.lafayette.edu > , and many others. Current maintainer: Sean M. Burke, < sburke@cpan.org > Having PERLDOCDEBUG set to a positive integer will make perldoc emit even more descriptive output than the -v switch does – the higher the number, the more it emits. One useful value for PERLDOC_PAGER is less -+C -E . perldoc will use, in order of preference, the pager defined in PERLDOC_PAGER , MANPAGER , or PAGER before trying to find a pager on its own. ( MANPAGER is not used if perldoc was told to display plain text or unformatted pod.) perldoc also searches directories specified by the PERL5LIB (or PERLLIB if PERL5LIB is not defined) and PATH environment variables. (The latter is so that embedded pods for executables, such as perldoc itself, are available.) Useful values for PERLDOC include -oman , -otext , -otk , -ortf , -oxml , and so on, depending on what modules you have on hand; or exactly specify the formatter class with -MPod::Perldoc::ToMan or the like. Any switches in the PERLDOC environment variable will be used before the command line arguments. Because perldoc does not run properly tainted, and is known to have security issues, when run as the superuser it will attempt to drop privileges by setting the e ff ective and real IDs to nobody’s or nouser’s account, or -2 if unavailable. If it cannot relinquish its privileges, it will not run. Displays the version of perldoc you’re running. Ignore case. Recursive search. Specify replacement for nro ff The item you want to look up. Nested modules (such as File::Basename ) are specified either as File::Basename or File/Basename . You may also give a descriptive name of a page, such as perlfunc . Use an index if it is present – the -X option looks for an entry whose basename matches the name given on the command line in the file $Config{archlib}/pod.idx . The pod.idx file should contain fully qualified filenames, one per line.