$0 in perl pod, not expanding to script name

[spatterson]

I have a perl script containing some brief documentation in pod format. Normally (or at least outside of perlpod) $0 is the script name, but in perlpod, $0 is output literally as '$0'.

Is there any way I can dynamically access the current script name inside perlpod? I'm returning to perl after a few years on PHP & can vaguely remember doing something similar in the past.

[tobyink]

Pod is a markup language, not a programming language. While markup languages can sometimes have things like macros and variables in them, pod doesn't. It's super simple. So, long story short, pod doesn't have what you want.

However, you could use a templating module to output your pod from a template, and use that to do variable substitution.

[thanos1983]

Hello spatterson,

Can you provide us a small sample of script that replicates the case that you are mentioning?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

=pod

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This script can have 2 parameters. The name or address of a machine
and a command. It will execute the command on the given machine and
print the output to the screen.

=cut

print "Here comes the name of the script ... $0\n";

__END__

$ perl test.pl
Here comes the name of the script ... test.pl

Looking forward to your update.

[spatterson]

Stripped down to the minimum, my code is this: I simply want the first $0 (inside perlpod) to output the script name

=pod


Usage: C<$0>

=cut

$arg = shift();

if (defined($arg) && $arg eq '-h') {
    print `pod2text $0`;
}

[hippo]

In that case, just post-process it:

=pod


Usage: C<$0>

=cut

$arg = shift();

if (defined($arg) && $arg eq '-h') {
    for (`pod2text $0`) {
        s/\$0/$0/;
        print;
    }
}