Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

POD (Plain Old Documentation) Files

POD, short for Plain Old Documentation, is a simple formatting language for creating documentation to go along with your Perl scripts or modules. Commonly, you'll embed that documentation inside your script file itself; that way you can keep both the script and the documentation together and not have to keep track of each separately (Perl will happily ignore the POD content when it executes your scripts).

To view the POD content of your script (or to view POD files containing nothing but POD content), you can use the perldoc script (part of the Perl distribution) to display that text on your screen, or you can use a translator to convert the POD files into something else—for example, pod2text for text files, ...