[tpm] Implementing a 'less' like pager in perl

[James E Keenan]

On Mar 1, 2010, at 8:49 PM, Digimer wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>   I like to have built-in '--help' messages in some of my programs,  
> but am always at a loss for how to allow the user to page through  
> it. Usually I have a message at the bottom akin to; "Please call './ 
> foo --help |less' to make reading this help message easier".

...

>
>   I know I could use perldoc, but I don't like assuming that my  
> user knows anything about perl.
>

If you "usually" tell the user to call './foo -- help | less', then  
it stands to reason your user is familiar with the Unix command-line.

In which case, instructing them to call 'perldoc ./foo' is not much  
of a stretch.

Or, you could create 'man' pages for your programs.  They, too,  
automatically include paging.

If you wrote POD for your programs, you could use 'pod2man' to  
generate the man pages.  (And I have a CPAN distribution, Pod-Multi,  
that will let you generate documentation from POD simultaneously to  
text, man and HTML format.)

Jim Keenan