Pythian Group

When I begin to work with a module, most of the time what I do is to look at its pod, and copy the code in the synopsis that I’ll use as a a baseline.

Open pod, copy, paste. That’s a lot of exhausting work… While I’m pretty sure there’s already a better tool to do it somewhere in CPAN, here’s my little podsyn script that does all the hard work for me.

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Half the time I want to peek at the doc of a module, I hit perldoc.  The rest of the time I type cpan Some::Module^[1] in Firefox and read the POD straight out of CPAN.  And while it’s pretty and handy, it also feels kinda silly to go on a remote server to read documentation that is also sitting on my computer. Surely, I tell myself, there must be a better way.

Cue in the several Perl modules that act as local POD web servers.  After giving a few of them a quick test-run, I decided to give Pod::POM::Web a try. Being a CLI jockey, I wanted to be able to open the POD of a module from the command line.  Not a problem, I just had to create the script ‘pod’:

#!/bin/bash

POD_PORT=8787

perl -MPod::POM::Web -e"Pod::POM::Web->server($POD_PORT)" 2> /dev/null &

PAGE=`perl -e's(::)(/)g for @ARGV; print @ARGV' $1`

HOSTNAME=`hostname`

kfmclient openURL "http://${HOSTNAME}:$POD_PORT/$PAGE";

There is not even a need to fire up the Pod::POM::Web server beforehand: the script will do it for us (if the server is already running, subsequent calls to pod will harmlessly try to start a new server on the same port and fail).  It should be noted that ‘kfmclient’ is KDE-specific — for any other desktop environment, you might want to change that to a direct call to firefox.

It’s already not too shabby, but wouldn’t it be even better with a little bit of auto-completeness magic?  To do that, we need a short script, pod_complete:

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