Even without knowing that .3pm indicates a man page, there's a pretty strong clue in that the full path of the file includes a .../man/... directory.

As for why your code couldn't find the file to (try to) use it, note that the filename is Search::Elasticsearch.3pm, but the error message indicates that Perl was trying to find a module named Search/Elasticsearch.pm - use converts :: to /, while the filename contains a literal ::, in addition to the extension being different.

Of course, if you really wanted to, you could pass the filename as a string (rather than a bareword) to require and get Perl to try to load it as a module that way, despite the literal colons and the extension... but it would still fail, because the file content is written in troff markup rather than Perl code and/or POD markup, so the result would be an ugly mess of syntax errors instead of working code: 

~$ perl -E "require '/usr/local/share/man/man3/oo.3pm'"
Bareword found where operator expected at /usr/local/share/man/man3/oo
+.3pm line 2, near "*(C"
    (Missing operator before C?)
String found where operator expected at /usr/local/share/man/man3/oo.3
+pm line 4, near ".    ds C` ""
    (Missing semicolon on previous line?)
String found where operator expected at /usr/local/share/man/man3/oo.3
+pm line 5, near ".    ds C' ""
    (Missing semicolon on previous line?)
String found where operator expected at /usr/local/share/man/man3/oo.3
+pm line 6, near ".    ds L""
    (Missing semicolon on previous line?)
<...a few dozen more lines of the same omitted...>
String found where operator expected at /usr/local/share/man/man3/oo.3
+pm line 22, at end of line
    (Missing semicolon on previous line?)
Can't find string terminator '"' anywhere before EOF at /usr/local/sha
+re/man/man3/oo.3pm line 22.
Compilation failed in require at -e line 1.

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In reply to Re: cpan installing .3pm files? by dsheroh
in thread cpan installing .3pm files? by merlinsdemon

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