a) do you have the coreutils package installed (which provides the stat binary
on my machine
b) that is not true, there are manpages for a whole lot of file, for example
if you have the mesa development files installed you have the manpages for
all Opengl functions available.
On my system i have two separate stat manpage i have
man 1 stat
(this describes the command like i pasted below)
man 2 stat
(which describes the stat system calls which you can use in c/c++ (and
probably other) programs to get information about files on you system.)
helios@kafka:~$ dpkg -S /usr/share/man/man2/stat.2.gz
manpages-dev: /usr/share/man/man2/stat.2.gz
elios@kafka:~$ dpkg -S /usr/share/man/man1/stat.1.gz
coreutils: /usr/share/man/man1/stat.1.gz
As you can see both manpages (which have the same name but cover different
topics) are originating from different packages, so normally installing
coreutils should provide you with the binary you need.
hth