Where are OS X man pages stored?

Solution 1:

The man pages on MacOS X are located in /usr/share/man.

Checking a nearby system, the $MANPATH variable's contents look like: /usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/share/man

As for the application you compiled, how did you install the binary? Was this installed from a basic tarball?

On Mac OS X, the /private/etc/manpaths file is the default file that will tell man where to look for manpages.

On my machine, it contains two paths:

/usr/share/man /usr/local/share/man

As mentioned above - the path is /usr/share/man

As an option - you can install iftop using homebrew - then it will store man pages in /usr/local/Cellar/iftop/0.17/share/man

And to specify a right path to man pages during the install from sources - you can pass --mandir= parameter to ./configure script

i.e. something like

./configure --disable-debug --prefix=/usr/local --mandir=/usr/share//man and then do make install