[OS X TeX] Symlinks

[Alain Schremmer]

On Jan 6, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Simon Spiegel wrote Re: [OS X TeX]  
Keeping TeX installations synchronized between machines

> A symlink is something like an alias, but not quite the same. It  
> also refers to a location on your hard drive, but comes from the  
> Unix side. Symlinks are created in the shell, aliases in the  
> Finder. The main difference between symlinks and aliases is that a  
> symlink is completely transparent, meaning that the file system  
> handles the symlink exactly like the place it refers to which is  
> not the case with aliases.
>
> To create an alias you have to go the Terminal and enter something  
> like:
>
> ln -s target link_name
>
> So let's say you put your personal texmf tree on your iDisk, you  
> had to do something like this:
>
> Open the terminal
> Go to ~/Library with 'cd ~/Library'
> then create a symlink in ~/Library which refers to the texmf folder  
> on your iDisk 'ln -s /Volumes/nameofyouriDisk/texmf'
>
> After this, LaTeX will automatically use the texmf directory on  
> your iDisk.


In order to keep my preambles, etc as short as possible, I use .sty  
files. Since I don't know what I am doing, I proceed by trials and  
error which works but at the cost of many different versions.

Not only to synchronize between machines, but in general to keep  
everything that belongs to a given version together, I wanted to keep  
the sty files together with the project files and I used symlinks to  
these sty files in texmf > tex > Latex.

With a little bit of trial and error, I managed to do that and it  
worked for one tome but not for the other. So, I remembered having  
downloaded SymbolicLinker which Vosberg had mentioned on On Apr 6,  
2009, at 6:19 AM, RA.

And that worked exactly as advertised.

What I will also do is to make a copy of each tome on my laptop and  
create symlinks there too. Then, what I hope will work is that the  
symlinks will not notice when I change a file to a new version--with  
the same name of course.

Grateful regards to both Spiegel and Vosberg
--schremmer