[tex-live] Gow
Reinhard Kotucha
reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Mon Aug 2 03:44:54 CEST 2010
On 1 August 2010 Robert Eckl wrote:
> Hi Reinhard,
>
> Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> >
> >Could anybody install Gow (at least the programs ln and ls) and tell me
> whether this works:
> >
> > 1. cd /path/to/texlive/20xx/bin/win32
> >
> > 2. del pdflatex.exe
> >
> > 3. ln -s pdftex.exe pdflatex.exe
> >
> > 4. pdflatex --version
> >
> My result is:
> MiKTeX-pdfTeX 2.8.3759 (1.40.10) (MiKTeX 2.8)
> Copyright (C) 1982 D. E. Knuth, (C) 1996-2006 Han The Thanh
> TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society.
>
> This means, pdflatex in the current directory is not found, it is
> found in PATH (behind TeXLives PATH)
Hi Robert,
thank you very much for testing. The information you provided is
very useful. I fear that .exe.lnk files are useless if .exe files
are found first even if they appear later in PATH. I tend to assume
that this problem isn't solvable.
> >And what is the result of "ls -l pdflatex"? Do you see something
> like "pdflatex -> pdftex"?
> >
> ls: pdflatex: No such file or directory
Ok, Gow's ls obviously doesn't circumvent the M$ extension craziness.
Cygwin obviously does.
> but ls -l pdflatex* results to
>
> lr--r--r-- 1 Robert 0 529 2010-07-31 23:24 pdflatex.exe.lnk ->
> H:/texlive/2010/bin/win32/pdftex.exe
I would expect a relative link here. Either Microsoft doesn't support
relative paths in .lnk files or it's a bug in Gow's ln command.
Absolute paths are not acceptable because they make TeX Live
non-relocatable, which is very painful if you install it on a
USB~stick which is assigned to different "drive letters" on different
machines.
> and then:
>
> pdflatex.exe.lnk --version results to
>
> pdfTeX 3.1415926-1.40.11-2.2 (Web2C 2010)
> [...]
I suppose that "pdflatex --version" works if there's no other TeX
distribution in PATH.
> >Don't be worried if it doesn't work. You can always restore
> >pdflatex.exe:
> >
> > cd /path/to/texlive/20xx/bin/win32
> > copy /b pdftex.exe pdflatex.exe
> >
> First, it wasn´t possible to delete the link. But i could solve it.
I encountered such problems too.
> My system is WIN XP 5.1.2600 (home), AFAIK with all SPs.
>
> Another try
>
> ln -s -S=exe pdftex.exe pdflatex
>
> this results to pdflatex.lnk
>
> All the links in the explorer are shown without the suffix .lnk
I fear that it doesn't matter whether it's .exe.lnk or .lnk because
it's very likely that Windows looks for .exe files first in all PATH
components.
A clear specification of the .lnk file format and the search strategy
would be very helpful but I didn't find anything in the internet.
What I've found is what someone else reverse engineered:
http://www.stdlib.com/art6-Shortcut-File-Format-lnk.html
It seems that relative links are possible. But the main problem is
the search order of executable files in PATH.
At a first glance it looked quite promising. Symlinks really make
life easier. They are much more user-friendly than the stubs we
currently have but I fear that we have to live with them in the future.
Robert, thank you very much. I'm glad that *you* tested it because
you have more than one TeX installation on your machine and thus
detected a problem which we hadn't noticed otherwise.
Regards,
Reinhard
--
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Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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