There are different versions of man
floating around: the one based on the man-db project (used in many Linux distros) and the one that comes with macOS, at least as far as I know. I was unable to find a project page for the latter, but it seems to be maintained by Federico Lucifredi.
The main point is this: Lucifredi's man
supports opening a file directly when providing the path to it with a slash:
man ./command.1
This is mentioned in the macOS man page for man
:
However, if name
contains a slash (/
) then man
interprets it as a file specification, so that you can do man ./foo.5
or even man /cd/foo/bar.1.gz
.
and it's also hinted at in a blog post by Lucifredi:
One more tip for you:
man ./foo.1
is your friend, to see what you just wrote and marked up in all its glory — and bugs.