How to download all available manpages from a distribution

To convert every man page to pdf I did man -k . > temp. I created a temp file and a script named file.sh:

#! /bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
    to_pdf=$(which ps2pdf)
    if [ -z "$to_pdf" ] ; then
    to_pdf=$(which pstopdf)
    fi
    name="$1"
    case "$to_pdf"  in
        *pstopdf) man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" -i -o "$fname.pdf" ;;
        *ps2pdf)  man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" - "$name.pdf" ;;
        *)        man -t "$name" > "$fname.ps"
    esac
    exit $?
fi
echo "Wrong number of parameters"
exit 1

I wrote a python file pythonfile.py

import os
f=open("temp","r")
for i in f:
    c="bash file.sh "+str(i)
    os.system(c)`

Then I did

python pythonfile.py 

This will create a pdf for every man page separately inside your working directory.

You can't just run man foo.gz It looks like you can run man foo.1.gz but using the -l seems cleaner. From man man:

   -l, --local-file
          Activate `local' mode.  Format and display  local  manual  files
          instead  of  searching  through  the system's manual collection.
          Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source
          file in the correct format.  No cat file is produced.  If '-' is
          listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from  stdin.
          When  this  option  is  not used, and man fails to find the page
          required, before displaying the error message,  it  attempts  to
          act as if this option was supplied, using the name as a filename
          and looking for an exact match.

So, your script should be something like:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
## synopses - extract all synopses in /usr/share/man/man1

## No need to cd into the directory, you can just use globs     
for i in /usr/share/man/man1/ajc*.gz; do
    ## This will print the name of the command.      
    basename "${i//.1.gz}"
    man -l "$i"  | 
       awk '/^SYNOPSIS/{a=1; getline}
            (/^[a-zA-z0-9_]/ && a==1){a=0} 
            (a==1 && /./){print}' | tr -s [:space:]

done

The awk command I give works better than your approach (test it on man ajc for example) and now also works on multi-line synopses. Most of the errors you see are irrelevant, others were due to the way you were handling file names. Let me know if this one works better.