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Make a manpage executable

Sometimes you just want to use a binary locally and not do a proper installation, but also want to make the man-page easily accessible.

You can add the following to the top of a man-page, and make it executable, e.g. for the man page source file 'thttpd.8': -

#!/usr/bin/man -l

So your file might look something like this: -

#!/usr/bin/man -l
.TH thttpd 8 "29 February 2000"
.SH NAME
thttpd - tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B thttpd
.RB [ -C
.IR configfile ]
.RB [ -p
.IR port ]

etc. etc. etc. ...

So when I 'chmod a+x thttpd.8' and run it, the man page shows in the man page reader.

It may be a good idea to rename the file (e.g. manpage_thttpd) to differentiate if from a normal man page source file.

Your 'man' command may be located somewhere else, if so you can usually find it with the command 'which man'.