[OS X TeX] Staying on the right PATH (or something)

[Charilaos Skiadas]

I'm sure other people will give much more enlightening answers, but  
the gist of it is that GUI applications don't get to call the shell  
initialization scripts that get run when a terminal opens. So  
anything that is defined in files like .bash_profile, .tchrc doesn't  
get read when in a GUI.

For instance if you open TeXShop/Texmaker or whatnot from the  
terminal using "open", then it will inherit the environment from the  
terminal and hence will have the things defined. But if you open the  
app from finder by double-clicking, then the process calling it is  
not the terminal, hence it will not have these variables there.

And that's where the problems begin...  ;)

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College

On Nov 14, 2007, at 9:50 AM, Morten Høgholm wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Forgive me if the following is just me being naïve.
>
>
> I am trying to support some users using Texmaker on both *nix, OS X  
> and Windows. In order to do so, it must be configured correctly and  
> this is where the fun begins... We want to avoid giving a full path  
> to the executable as often the system knows what to do with a file.  
> On OS X we have
>   open %.pdf
> which will then do as expected. Similarly, we discovered that on  
> Windows we could use
>   cmd /C start %.pdf
> and this then does the same as open. Good.
>
> On Windows, latex and friends are added to the PATH by MiKTeX and  
> so one can call it as
>   latex %.tex
> This works on *nix as well but not on OS X even though latex is of  
> course in the PATH. Can anybody explain to me why this is? TeXShop  
> expects the path to the executable as well, right? And what does an  
> application like Aquamacs do differently, since it just has a call  
> to latex and doesn't care where it is located?
>
> I would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me in this matter.
>
> TIA
> -- 
> Morten
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