To read a man page from a local directory in Linux or Unix, you can use the man command with the -l option, followed by the path to the man page file.
For example, if you have a man page file named mypage.1 in the /usr/local/man/man1 directory, you can read the man page by running the following command:
man -l /usr/local/man/man1/mypage.1
This will display the man page in a pager program, such as less. You can then use the pager's navigation commands to scroll through the man page.
By default, the man command searches for man pages in the directories specified in the MANPATH environment variable. If you want to override this and search a specific directory for man pages, you can use the -M option followed by the path to the directory.
For example:
man -M /usr/local/man/man1 mypage
This will search the /usr/local/man/man1 directory for a man page named mypage, and display it if it is found.
It's important to note that man pages are typically organized into sections based on the type of information they contain. Each man page has a name and a section number, such as mypage.1 for a man page in section 1 (General commands). To specify the section number when using the man command, you can use the -s option followed by the section number.
For example:
man -s 1 mypage
This will search for a man page named mypage in section 1 of the man pages.
You can use the -a option to display all of the available man pages for a given name, regardless of their section number.
For example:
man -a mypage
This will search for all man pages with the name mypage, and display them one after the other. You can use the -p option to specify a list of pagers to use, separated by commas.
For example:
man -p less,more mypage
This will search for a man page named mypage, and display it using less if it is available, or more if less is not available.