Recently, I wanted to install a program in my home bin directory, and it had a man page to go with it. I started looking for a way to create my own personal man directory. According to the manual page for man, “man uses a sophisticated method of finding manual page files.” Indeed it does. It turns out that all I had to do was create a man directory inside of my home directory and man would know it was there:
zac@dakara:~$ manpath /usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man zac@dakara:~$ mkdir man zac@dakara:~$ manpath /home/zac/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man
Then to install the man page, I simply had to create the appropriate directory structure and copy the man page in:
zac@dakara:~$ mkdir -p man/en/man1/