The attached patch fixes the splitpod program in perl-5.8.1 which doesn't currently split POD files on =item properly. I submitted a patch for a related problem in March (http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-03/msg00720.html) which changed if (s/=item (\S+)/$1/) { to if (/=item (\S+)/ and $1 ne '*') { s/=item (\S+)/$1/; but when the patch was applied (as #19140) a small adjustment was made, so that the above became this: if (/=item (\S+)/ and $1 ne '*') { s/=item //; This looks harmless enough, but unfortunately $1 is actually used later in the "if" block, and that s/=item // has clobbered it :-( I didn't spot this at the time, and have only just spotted it now that I come to build Perl 5.8.1 "for real". Obviously I omitted testing the POD conversion utilities during the testing of all those perl-5.8.1-RC's :-( Anyway, the attached patch fixes it, hopefully in a less fragile way. - SteveThread Next