How do you view a man page you just created?

Question

Suppose I have a man page, which I just wrote and passed through nroff -man, called command.1

How do I view it with man now? I looked though the man man page, and maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything. I also searched google.

Is it only possible to view using nroff -man? Is there a command line option for man to view that specific file? Is it necessary to modify MANPATH?

Answer 1

Put the command.1 man page in a new folder called man1. Then, assuming you're in the folder containing the new man1 folder, call the man command like this:

man -M . command

Replace the dot by the path to the folder containing the man1 folder if you're located elsewhere.

Answer 2

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.