The default value ignores shell I lines. General Perl and Jave are execptions among the programming languages, because they include a way to embed documentating inside program. Perl interpreter knows POD and it can ignore those lines. In other programming languages, like Emacs lisp and Shell programs, Procmail code, you don t have anything out of the box. The idea is that you can generate html docs similarly that what pod2html does.
Program reads documentation from the beginning of file.
The very first line determines the comment string in the file. Most important is the first line or near first, if the file is shell script, must be exactly like the following. This gives the name of the file and description string. Very First line determines what is the comment string that is ripped away from the beginning of lines. You must not use multiple of comment markers like above I , this will handicap ripdoc.pl.