How to display man page with a specific path?

Question

There are some binaries and corresponding man pages on the IBM AIX system I am working with (/some/path/bin and /some/path/man), but neither bin nor man directory are in my $PATH or $MANPATH . I would like to view the specific man page. How do I display the man page, given I know its locaction, i.e. /some/path/man/my_man.5?

If I run man /some/path/man/my_man.5 I get Manual entry for /some/path/man/my_man.5 not found or not installed.

I have tried to add the path /some/path/man to my $MANPATH environment variable, but then when I do man my_man.5 I get the usual man screen, but it displays only the header of the whole man page, i.e. Page 1, while if I vim /some/path/man/my_man.5 I see the whole text.

The issue seems to manifest itself on AIX system (where as I understand lot of tools are not GNU), cause if I do man /some/path/man/my_man.5 on Linux system I do get the expected man screen.

Answer 1

Override the MANPATH variable for this call to man - i.e.:

 MANPATH=/usr/local/share/man man gcc

Note that a variable assignment before a command does not change the current environment - only the called command get's a modified environment.

EDIT:

If the manpage is not displayed properly, you may have to check whether nroff and friends are installed properly on the system. Could be that a specific roff macro package is missing - but this is hard to tell from this side of the screen.

Another explanation would be that the man page in question uses GNU-roff extensions not supported by standard roff.

EDIT 2:

To test whether installed nroff is able to cope with the provided man page:

 nroff -man -Tascii youmanpage.man > yourmanpage.txt