How to use `perldoc` within Emacs (shell)?

Question

While programming using Emacs, you frequently consult manual pages. My environment is text-based Emacs via SSH.

While I can open "Normal" manual pages in Emacs using the man command ((man MAN-ARGS)function), I wonder how to use perldoc for Perl POD documentation from within Emacs: When I run it (e.g.: perldoc -f pack) from a shell ((shell &optional BUFFER) function), I get a message saying:

WARNING: terminal is not fully functional

Specifically, the number of terminal lines is less than what the Emacs windows offers. The terminal seems to be set to dumb, but even when I use TERM=emacs perldoc -f pack only 24 lines are used, and I see a lines 1-23 prompt (pager asking to continue). I also see that LINES is set to 24, even though my (outer) terminal has 103 lines.

Obviously, as the window can be resized, counting the number of lines and setting LINES accordingly does not look like a smart answer for this problem. Despite of that, using TERM=emacs LINES=100 perldoc -f pack still stopped output at line 24.

So maybe it's an Emacs question, actually.

Answer 1

It seems the solution is rather simple: Just add perldoc's -T option ("This specifies that the output is not to be sent to a pager, but is to be sent directly to STDOUT."):

v04:~/src/Perl/OTP> perldoc -T -f pack
perldoc -T -f pack
    pack TEMPLATE,LIST
            Takes a LIST of values and converts it into a string using the
            rules given by the TEMPLATE. The resulting string is the
            concatenation of the converted values. Typically, each converted
            value looks like its machine-level representation. For example,
            on 32-bit machines an integer may be represented by a sequence
            of 4 bytes, which will in Perl be presented as a string that's 4
            characters long.
...
                # pack little-endian 16- and 32-bit signed integers
                $foo = pack('(sl)<', -42, 4711);
                # exactly the same

            The same template may generally also be used in unpack().

v04:~/src/Perl/OTP>