Sometimes, a particular program may default to installing some of its files to non-standard locations on disk. In particular, a source archive may have a number of installation paths that do not follow the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Fortunately, the configure script doesn't just permit the changing of the install prefix, but also allows us to change the install location for various system components such as man pages.

This capability comes in very handy, since most source archives aren't yet FHS-compliant. Nearly always, you'll need to add a --mandir=/usr/share/man and a --infodir=/usr/share/info to the configure command line in order to make your source package FHS-compliant.