[tex-live] What is wrong with my tex?

[Axel E. Retif]

On  30 Apr, 2009, at 15:47, Timothy Legg wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I installed TeX Live on my Debian system using the install-tl.tar.gz  
> provided on http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire.html
>
> Aside from the script not appending my $PATH (which I fixed  
> manually), there still seems to be something wrong.  Does anybody  
> recognize this problem?  I swear this worked when I installed a  
> similar distribution of TeX about 6 years ago...
>
> legg at debian:~$ tex sample.tex
                   ^
                 You should use LaTeX
>
> This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (Web2C 7.5.7)
> (./sample.tex
> ! Undefined control sequence.
> l.6 \documentclass
>                   {article}      % Specifies the document class

Try `` latex sample.tex '': it's a LaTeX document, which is the only  
of the TeX macro family (plain, LaTeX, ConTeXt) that uses  
\documentclass.

Best,

Axel