Why is perldoc failing here?

Question

Downloaded ActiveState Perl V5.22.3 (tried V5.24, same result) and I can't get perldoc to run! perldoc responds with 'Invalid parameter - -R'.

Here's my command window:

I'm not having issues running scripts - just perldoc.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

There's a bug in perldoc version 3.27. See this posting on the ActiveState site for a workaround.

https://community.activestate.com/node/20823

grahams ActiveState Staff Wed, 2017-02-15 11:09

This is confirmed in 5.24.1 and 5.22.3.

It's happening in the section where perldoc hands off to the local equivalent of nroff. On Win32 and Win64, a bug is allowing perldoc to get into a block of code intended to fix a problem on Debian Linux (bugs.debian.org/758689). This block won't run on Windows, so the handoff to pod2text fails.

C:\> perldoc CGI
Invalid parameter - -R

Workaround 1: Bypass perldoc and go directly to pod2text. Give pod2text the full path to the pod file.

pod2text C:\Perl\libCGI.pod

Workaround 2: Bypass the pager in perldoc.

perldoc -T CGI

Workaround 3: Use the previous release of 5.22.2 which has an older perldoc.