Self help in Perl

Perl's POD (Plain Old Documentation) system provides the programmer with the ability to add user documentation into his programs - allowing a single source file to include:
* The program itself
* Comments for future programmers who read the source
* Documentation for the user

Convertors such as pod2html and pod2man extract the POD documentation from a Perl program and produce HTML and manual pages as required ... and there are other convertors too supplied with Perl or available for download from the CPAN.

Here's an idea for using POD (and the text conversion of it) to provide a usage line and documentation for a perl program also using pod ... a program that generates its own documentation, just using the standard elements of the Perl distribution to do so.



#!/usr/bin/perl



$usage = @ARGV; # Modify this line to suit allowed command line parameters



if ($usage) {

        print STDERR "\nUsage: $0 [-h]\n\n";

        die `pod2text $0`;

        }



print "normal operation\n";



__END__



=head1 A program that documents itself



Here's a program that gives you a full

scale usage report when you run it ...



=cut

(written 2006-06-14, updated 2006-06-15)

Associated topics are indexed under

P219 - Perl - Libraries and Resources
  [3377] What do I mean when I add things in Perl? - (2011-08-02)
  [3101] The week before Christmas - (2010-12-23)
  [3009] Expect in Perl - a short explanation and a practical example - (2010-10-22)
  [2931] Syncronise - software, trains, and buses. Please! - (2010-08-22)
  [2427] Operator overloading - redefining addition and other Perl tricks - (2009-09-27)
  [2234] Loading external code into Perl from a nonstandard directory - (2009-06-12)
  [2229] Do not re-invent the wheel - use a Perl module - (2009-06-11)
  [1865] Debugging and Data::Dumper in Perl - (2008-11-02)
  [1863] About dieing and exiting in Perl - (2008-11-01)
  [1444] Using English can slow you right down! - (2007-11-25)
  [1391] Ordnance Survey Grid Reference to Latitude / Longitude - (2007-10-14)
  [1235] Outputting numbers as words - MySQL with Perl or PHP - (2007-06-17)
  [1219] Judging the quality of contributed Perl code - (2007-06-06)
  [737] Coloured text in a terminal from Perl - (2006-05-29)
  [712] Why reinvent the wheel - (2006-05-06)
  [358] Use standard Perl modules - (2005-06-25)
  [357] Where do Perl modules load from - (2005-06-24)
  [112] Avoid the wheel being re-invented by using Perl modules - (2004-11-08)
  [86] Talk review - Idiomatic Perl, David Cross - (2004-10-12)

P306 - Perl - Plain Old Documentation
  [668] Python - block insets help with documentation - (2006-04-04)
  [242] Satisfaction of training - (2005-03-11)

Back to
Watch your Google profile

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
Great new inventions

Some other Articles

Journey planning - Xephos v Transport Direct
Much more that the world cup
Huge data files - what happened earlier?
Great new inventions
Self help in Perl
Watch your Google profile
Very good for woodlice
Horse and Python training
Seeing the bricks for the trees
Using different URLs to navigate around a single script

3603 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 at 50 posts per page

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).

You can Add a comment or ranking to this page

Public Training Courses

Running regularly at our UK training Centre.
[Schedule] - [About] - [Book]

Like this? ??