Opening POD docs in Preview.app

If you're a Perl hacker on Max OS X, you probably find yourself referring to POD docs quite a bit.  I usually use TextMate for viewing POD of the current module I'm looking at, (Command-control-p) but TextMate's pod2html viewer only allows one document at a time,  This is often about 5 or 6 too few. The "perldoc" command has sort of a similar issue unless you want to have a large number of terminal windows open.

So if you fall into that category, you'll want to get pod2pdf and its associated libraries.  Unpack and install it[1].  Then, add the following little useful function to your .bash_profile or some script that is executed upon login.

# Convert, cache and open POD docs in Preview.app
podview() {
    # Customize the path to your POD PDF directory
    POD=~/Documents/POD

    module="$@"
    moduledir=`echo $module | sed -E 's/[:\/]+/_/g' \
                            | sed -E 's/^[\._]+//g' \
                            | sed -E 's/\.p[lm]$//g'`
    if [ ! -e "$POD" ]; then
        mkdir $POD
    fi
    if [ ! -e "$POD/$moduledir.pdf" ]; then

        perldoc -T -u $module > $POD/$moduledir
        pod2pdf $POD/$moduledir; rm $POD/$moduledir
    fi
    open -a Preview "$POD/$moduledir.pdf"
}

After that, all you have to do is type "podview Some::Perl::Module" and it will be automatically opened in Preview as a PDF.  In addition, the PDF is cached in ~/Documents/POD (by default) to speed up the process or loading it or even finding it with, say, QuickSilver?

[1] - Don't forget the actual pod2pdf wrapper script which is also included in the distribution but not installed via make install.  Put it somewhere in your path.