perldoc under Mac OS 10.6.1

Do you get this much?

PERLDOC(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDOC(1)
NAME
 perldoc - Look up Perl documentation in Pod format.
SYNOPSIS
 perldoc [-h] [-v] [-t] [-u] [-m] [-l] [-F] [-i] [-V] [-T] [-r] [-ddestination_file] [-oformatname]
 [-MFormatterClassName] [-wformatteroption:value] [-nnroff-replacement] [-X] [-L language_code]
 PageName|ModuleName|ProgramName
 perldoc -f BuiltinFunction
 perldoc -L it -f BuiltinFunction
 perldoc -q FAQ Keyword
 perldoc -L fr -q FAQ Keyword
 See below for more description of the switches.
DESCRIPTION
 perldoc looks up a piece of documentation in .pod format that is embedded in the perl installation
 tree or in a perl script, and displays it via "pod2man | nroff -man | $PAGER". (In addition, if
 running under HP-UX, "col -x" will be used.) This is primarily used for the documentation for the
 perl library modules.
 Your system may also have man pages installed for those modules, in which case you can probably just
 use the man(1) command.
 If you are looking for a table of contents to the Perl library modules documentation, see the perltoc
 page.

sprintf FORMAT, LIST
Returns a string formatted by the usual "printf" conventions of
the C library function "sprintf". See below for more details
and see sprintf(3) or printf(3) on your system for an
explanation of the general principles.

For example:

# Format number with up to 8 leading zeroes
$result = sprintf("%08d", $number);

# Round number to 3 digits after decimal point
$rounded = sprintf("%.3f", $number);

Perl does its own "sprintf" formatting‐‐it emulates the C
function "sprintf", but it doesn’t use it (except for floating‐
point numbers, and even then only the standard modifiers are
allowed). As a result, any non‐standard extensions in your
local "sprintf" are not available from Perl.

Unlike "printf", "sprintf" does not do what you probably mean
when you pass it an array as your first argument. The array is
given scalar context, and instead of using the 0th element of
the array as the format, Perl will use the count of elements in
the array as the format, which is almost never useful.

Perl’s "sprintf" permits the following universally‐known
conversions:

%% a percent sign
%c a character with the given number
%s a string
%d a signed integer, in decimal
%u an unsigned integer, in decimal
%o an unsigned integer, in octal
%x an unsigned integer, in hexadecimal
%e a floating−point number, in scientific notation
%f a floating−point number, in fixed decimal notation
%g a floating−point number, in %e or %f notation

In addition, Perl permits the following widely‐supported
conversions:

%X like %x, but using upper−case letters
%E like %e, but using an upper−case "E"
%G like %g, but with an upper−case "E" (if applicable)

-=-=-=-

Check your version and confirm your install is typical.

Well, you look spanky current version wise, I think. man should be working it seems, sorry. I'm assuming it works normally for other topics.

Again, I'd look to any non-default perl related installs/moves/paths/permissions etc. - routine stuff like repairing permissions, checking with a new test user account, dropping another quarter in the slot, perhaps. Can you SSH into that box and check from a remote account by any chance...

YeaSt2u wrote:
I checked perl -v and here is the output:

...

This is perl, v5.10.0 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
*Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on*
*this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl"*. If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.

Did you try typing in *+perldoc perl+* ? If that comes up, it will give you the names of the different perl docs that are available. If you want the documentation for sprintf, you look in the perlfunc doc, by typing *+perldoc perlfunc+* and search for sprintf.

Perhaps this is related. When I installed snow leopard, basic developer command line utilities were gone. I had to install the SL version of Developer Tools (XCode) to get them back. I currently have perldoc installed, but I can't tell you if it was prior to reinstalling Developer Tools.

The problem seems to be that the necessary pod files were not installed.

I happened to have the perl 5.8.9 source distribution on my machine, so I tried

sudo mkdir /System/Library/Perl/5.8.9/pods
sudo cp <perl-src-dir>/pod/*.pod /System/Library/Perl/5.8.9/pods

And now "perldoc perl", "perldoc -f xyz", etc., are back to working.

But it would be better to use the 5.10. distribution; I'll fetch that, and
try it next ...

It appears that the real problem is that you have to reinstall XCode after
upgrading to 10.6.
Once you install XCode, all the pod files seem to be in place, and perldoc
works the way it should.