Carlos wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] OT: Removing attachements from stored mails (or my problems with perl)' on Wed, Nov 03 at 13:58:
The Monday 2004-11-01 at 15:18 -0600, Danny Sauer wrote:
[...]
So, "perldoc perlinfo" is what you're looking for as a start.
cer@nimrodel:~> perldoc perlinfo No documentation found for "perlinfo".
It doesn't work. And 'pin' doesn't find it.
Argh. I typed perlinfo a bunch of times when I meant perlintro... Whoops. Sorry 'bout that.
If you do a "man perl", you'll get a list of lots of other docs that are also included, those sections are further described under "perldoc perltoc".
Ok - this document is 12858 lines long, a long, long plain file. It can not be searched easily, no _links_.
I like the '/' key, mostly because I live in vim. Surely your pager lets you search like that? The lack of links does suck, though. Read on...
Try, for example "pinfo fetchmail" (not info fetchmail). There is a line like this:
|> You can then handle the retrieved mail using normal mail |> user agents such as mutt(1), elm(1) or Mail(1).
The words mutt(1), elm(1) or Mail(1) are printed in green in the xterm text. I can click with the mouse, or cursor to elm(1) till it is red, hit enter, and open that man page. Left cursor will put me back on the previous documents. Ie, I can navigate plain man pages.
But perldoc doesn't do that. It is a "TOC" whose entries do not automatically take me to the referred documentation. Maybe there is a web page somewhere, but as I don't have a permanent network connection, I would have to mirror it locally, if possible.
That's a limitation of the default pager. Wanna browse documentation for all the modules on your system easily? Install Pod::Webserver (it has a few deps, but they're all small), run "podwebserver", and point a web browser to http://localhost:8020/. If you scroll down to the perl_core_docs section, you'll have nice HTML versions of all those things, interlinked and easily read/printed/etc. It's not quite as cool as JavaDoc, but it's right up there. Use lynx (or links) if you want a terminal view.
To use a man page I already have to know its name.
Yeah, it takes a little time to get comfortable with what a module's likely to be called. The CPAN search site is about the easiest thing to use, aside from searching in the CPAN shell (yay regexp search).
You know, I'm spoilt. During the time I programmed for a living, I used mostly Borland C and Borland Pascal - not only the IDE is magnific, but the online help was so good that I learned to program TP without a manual (of course, I had had classes, formal training). When I did get the TP manual (which were also splendid) I became a guru. Easy!
I'm spoilt: anything sort of that kind of environment and I start fidgeting O:-)
ActiveState has a nice IDE - Komodo - built on the mozilla framework. I think it's got a nice doc browser too (and you can use it with languages other than perl, if you like that kind of thing). --Danny