In particular, `ctags -x` generates human-readable tabular output (instead of the normal output designed for parsing by text editors) and annotates each symbol

In particular, `ctags -x` generates human-readable tabular output (instead of the normal output designed for parsing by text editors) and annotates each symbol to indicate whether it's a variable, function, macro, etc. If you want to get a list of all function names from file "foo.c", you could do something like: ctags -x foo.c | awk '$2=="function"{print $1}'