List of commands defined in CTAN packages

Question

Are there any resources available that list the control sequences/commands available from each package on CTAN (or other TeX hosting sites)?

I understand they are shown in the documentation PDF's, but this is rather tedious to look through and generate a list.

As an aside, why is this not required when submitting a package? Seems like it would be very helpful to package writers if they knew what commands are defined and where.

Answer 1

I agree with the sceptical tenor of the comments above - I don't see how such a list would be useful in real life. However, just for the heck of it, here is a little bash script that attempts to list all commands in all locally installed *.sty files.

#!/bin/bash

# search file system for all latex package files
packages=$(sh -c "find / -name '*.sty' | grep -oE '/([^/]+)/[^/]+\.sty$' | cut -f2 -d'/' | sort | uniq" 2>/dev/null)

# iterate over all packages to list their macros.
for package in $packages; do
    # run Martin Scharrer's `latexdef` on each package name to list the
    # commands defined therein. The loop hangs on arsclassica, so we 
    # skip it.
    if [ $package != "arsclassica" ]; then
        echo "package: $package"
        latexdef -l -p $package
    fi
done

Note that latexdef invokes TeX on each package, and sometimes that doesn't work properly, and you get compile error messages. You also get some empty lines, so you would have to filter the output. Also, it seems the compiler hangs when latexdef tries to process package arsclassica, which I therefore manually excluded. Since I only ever let the script run to package names starting with letter c, it is quite possible that more hangups would occur, and more exemptions be required, further on.

Also note that this does not cover *.cls or other files that may contain command definitions.