What is POD? POD, short name for Plain Old Documentation, is used as the file extension for Perl documentation files in Plain Old Documentation format. .POD files are text files that can be opened by Notepad or any text editors. See the sample .POD file included below.

File Extension: .POD

MIME Type: text/plain

File Content: Plain Old Documentation

.POD files are Plain Old Documentation files, which contain Perl documentation in Plain Old Documentation format. Here is a sample .POD Plain Old Documentation file containing some simple __Description__:

=head1 NAME

CPAN::API::HOWTO - a recipe book for programming with CPAN.pm

=head1 RECIPES

All of these recipes assume that you have put "use CPAN" at the top of
your program.

=head2 What distribution contains a particular module?

    my $distribution = CPAN::Shell->expand(
        "Module", "Data::UUID"
    )->distribution()->pretty_id();

This returns a string of the form "AUTHORID/TARBALL".  If you want the
full path and filename to this distribution on a CPAN mirror, then it is
C<.../authors/id/A/AU/AUTHORID/TARBALL>.

=head2 What modules does a particular distribution contain?

    CPAN::Index->reload();
    my @modules = CPAN::Shell->expand(
        "Distribution", "JHI/Graph-0.83.tar.gz"
    )->containsmods();

You may also refer to a distribution in the form A/AU/AUTHORID/TARBALL.

=head1 SEE ALSO

the main CPAN.pm documentation

=head1 LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See L<http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html>

=head1 AUTHOR

David Cantrell

=cut

.POD Plain Old Documentation file sample: Click sample.pod to download.

Since .POD files are in text format, you can use Notepad or any text editor to create or modify them. No special software is needed.

For for information on how to use .POD Plain Old Documentation files, see links below:

• perlpod - the Plain Old Documentation format.