(tye)Re: Getting perldoc to recognize different perl versions

[tye]

That should work.

The only thing I found that makes sense to me that might be breaking it is the

    eval 'exec /usr/bin/perl -S $0 ${1+"$@"}'
        if 0;

trickery that is in my copy of perldoc.

Perhaps you broke the #! line or are using a shell that doesn't honor them.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

[clwolfe]

Aha!
As many people have responded, and as I noted in my original posting, the shebang of perldoc was the first place to look, which I had already changed.

I then tried perldoc -v -f foo to see where it was looking. Lo and behold, perldoc-5.7.0 said it was looking in /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.7.0 (etc). Funny...so I tried a more pragmatic test:

perldoc-5.005 -f our
No documentation for perl function 'our' found 
perldoc-5.7.0 -f our 
('our'section of perlfunc appears)

OK, so it seems to be working! But the footer of the paged output says perl5.6.1, regardless of the actual documentation being displayed! Why???

So, reading perldoc's sourcecode, we find on line 328, a backtick system call to pod2man. AHA!! Of course, pod2man-VERSION's shebang points to /usr/local/bin/perl, which is really 5.6.1 . pod2man must get that version number from its perl interpreter (reasonably so), and then sticks it in the footer of the output.

So, I edited perldoc-VERSION to call pod2man-VERSION, and edited pod2man-VERSION to use perl-VERSION in the shebang line.

Mystery solved. Thanks for all of the responses, and I hope that others have found this to be educational.