---
name: "podchecker"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "perl"
version: "5.40.1-6+deb13u1"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux", "openbsd"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/podchecker"
---

# podchecker(1)

check the syntax of POD format documentation files

## NAME

podchecker - check the syntax of POD format documentation files

## SYNOPSIS

**podchecker** \[**-help**\] \[**-man**\] \[**-(no)warnings**\] \[*file* ...\]

## OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS

- **-help**

  Print a brief help message and exit.

- **-man**

  Print the manual page and exit.

- **-quiet**

  Do not print a success message.

- **-warnings** **-nowarnings**

  Turn on/off printing of warnings. Repeating **-warnings** increases the warning level, i.e. more warnings are printed. Currently increasing to level two causes flagging of unescaped "\<,\>" characters.

- *file*

  The pathname of a POD file to syntax-check (defaults to standard input).

## DESCRIPTION

**podchecker** will read the given input files looking for POD syntax errors in the POD documentation and will print any errors it find to STDERR. At the end, it will print a status message indicating the number of errors found.

Directories are ignored, an appropriate warning message is printed.

**podchecker** invokes the **podchecker()** function exported by **Pod::Checker** Please see "**podchecker()**" in Pod::Checker for more details.

## RETURN VALUE

**podchecker** returns a 0 (zero) exit status if all specified POD files are ok.

## ERRORS

**podchecker** returns the exit status 1 if at least one of the given POD files has syntax errors.

The status 2 indicates that at least one of the specified  files does not contain *any* POD commands.

Status 1 overrides status 2. If you want unambiguous results, call **podchecker** with one single argument only.

## SEE ALSO

Pod::Simple and Pod::Checker

## AUTHORS

Please report bugs using \<http://rt.cpan.org\>.

Brad Appleton \<bradapp@enteract.com\>, Marek Rouchal \<marekr@cpan.org\>

Based on code for **Pod::Text::pod2text(1)** written by Tom Christiansen \<tchrist@mox.perl.com\>