We'll make three adjustments to the sources of Man. The first patch comments out the "MANPATH /usr/man" line in the man.conf file to prevent redundant results when using programs such as whatis: patch -Np1 -i ../man-&man-manpath-patch-version;-manpath.patch The second patch adds the -R option to the PAGER variable so that escape sequences are handled properly: patch -Np1 -i ../man-&man-pager-patch-version;-pager.patch The third and last patch prevents a problem when man pages not formatted with more than 80 columns are used in conjunction with recent releases of groff: patch -Np1 -i ../man-&man-80cols-patch-version;-80cols.patch The paths to some programs are hard-wired into Man's executables. Unfortunately, the configuration script picks the last location in PATH rather than the first place a program is found. By appending /usr/bin:/bin to PATH for the ./configure command, we ensure that Man doesn't use the programs in the /tools directory. Now prepare Man for compilation: PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/bin ./configure -default -confdir=/etc The meaning of the configure options: -default: This tells the configure script to select a sensible set of default options. For example: only English man pages, no message catalogs, man not suid, handle compressed man pages, compress cat pages, create cat pages whenever the appropriate directory exists, follow FHS by putting cat pages under /var/cache/man provided that that directory exists. -confdir=/etc: This tells the man program to look for the man.conf configuration file in the /etc directory. Compile the package: make And install it: make install If you wish to disable SGR escape sequences, you should edit the man.conf file and add the -c argument to nroff. You may want to also take a look at the BLFS book which deals with formatting and compression issues for man pages.