Preview man-page without installing package.

Question

Hi

I've checked out some typical open source project which is using auto-tools. I want to hack a bit on this package, but I would also like to change something in the man-page of the package.

The man-page source is found project-name/doc/project-name.1. I just made a small change, and now I want to preview that change, without having to actually do a make install of the project. How do I do that?

I tried stuff like:

man -M . 1 project-name

But it does not work, neither does the various variations I have tried. This sounds like a simple problem, but I can't seem to find anything by googling on the problem, so I'm hoping someone here can help me out. Thanks.

Answer 1

nroff -man /path/to/manfile.1 | less

Answer 2

man -l /path/to/manfile.1

On my system, the output from this command is different from nroff -man file.1 | less. Paragraphs wrap at the edge of the terminal, for instance, rather than at 78 characters.