NAME

Pod::Cpandoc - perldoc that works for modules you don't have installed

SYNOPSIS

    cpandoc File::Find
        -- shows the documentation of your installed File::Find

    cpandoc Acme::BadExample
        -- works even if you don't have Acme::BadExample installed!

    cpandoc -c Text::Xslate
        -- shows the changelog file for Text::Xslate

    cpandoc -v '$?'
        -- passes everything through to regular perldoc

    cpandoc -m Acme::BadExample | grep system
        -- options are respected even if the module was scraped

    vim `cpandoc -l Web::Scraper`
        -- getting the idea yet?

    cpandoc http://darkpan.org/Eval::WithLexicals::AndGlobals
        -- URLs work too!

DESCRIPTION

cpandoc is a perl script that acts like perldoc except that if it would have bailed out with No documentation found for "Uninstalled::Module", it will instead scrape a CPAN index for the module's documentation.

One important feature of cpandoc is that it only scrapes the live index if you do not have the module installed. So if you use cpandoc on a module you already have installed, then it will just read the already-installed documentation. This means that the version of the documentation matches up with the version of the code you have. As a fringe benefit, cpandoc will be fast for modules you've installed. :)

All this means that you should be able to drop in cpandoc in place of perldoc and have everything keep working. See "SNEAKY INSTALL" for how to do this.

If you set the environment variable CPANDOC_FETCH to a true value, then we will print a message to STDERR telling you that cpandoc is going to make a request against the live CPAN index.

TRANSLATIONS

Japanese

    Japanese documentation can be found at
    L<http://perldoc.jp/docs/modules/Pod-Cpandoc-0.09/Cpandoc.pod>,
    contributed by @bayashi.

SNEAKY INSTALL

    cpanm Pod::Cpandoc

    then: alias perldoc=cpandoc
    or:   function perldoc () { cpandoc "$@" }

    Now `perldoc Acme::BadExample` works!

perldoc should continue to work for everything that you're used to, since cpandoc passes all options through to it. cpandoc is merely a subclass that falls back to scraping a CPAN index when it fails to find your queried file in @INC.

AUTHOR

Shawn M Moore code@sartak.org

COPYRIGHT

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.