Jeff Kell wondered about how to find the list of topics using man from the
shell:
 
>Yes, but that implies you KNOW the topics ahead of time.  Unless I'm mistaken
>(I'd be happy to be corrected!) there is no "index" or "table of contents"
to the man pages, so you don't know what's available.
 
I'll admit that the information in the man man entry can be a little hard to
get through, but I found two pieces of information in the entry that allowed
me to get a list of all items in the man database.  The first is the use of
the -k option to "get a synopsis line for information on keywords", and the
second is a hint later in the entry that says that /usr/man is the primary
location for the man command data, and that the file `whatis' is used for the
-k searches.
 
The simplest way to get a list is to just look (edit, print, or whatever you
like to do) at the file /usr/man/whatis.  This contains the names of all the
documented commands along with a one line description of the command.  You
can get the same result by searching with the -k option with a keyword that
will match every entry.  This command would look like:
 
shell/iX> man -k '('
 
which depends on the all the man entries having a left paren in their
command entry.  A short subset of the list looks like this:
 
alias(1) -- display or create command aliases
ar(1) -- create and maintain library archives
asa(1) -- interpret ASA/FORTRAN carriage control
ascii(3) -- table of ASCII collating sequence
awk(1) -- data transformation, report generation language
banner(1) -- display text in large font
...
 
I probably should have pointed this out explicitly rather than leaving it as
"an excersise for the reader."  But, who knows, maybe someone out there
actually enjoyed digging in and figuring it out for themselves?
 
Craig