First post here. Have an 09 pathfinder auto 4wd. Have a chance to get a running 09 frontier manual 2wd. Already looked through forums and couldn’t find a clear answer, but was wondering about swapping manual trans to pathfinder while keeping 4wd. From forums I thought most would be bolt in but wanted to double check before jumping in as pathfinder is my wife’s daily but she prefers manual transmissions.

Not physically possible. The transmissions are built completely different. There is no way to mount a 4WD transfer case from a '09 Pathfinder to a manual transmission from a '09 Frontier. These pics below, showing the two drivetrains, are clearly incompatible.