[tex-live] Perhaps OT: temporary files of otftotfm

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 7 February 2010 Ulrike Fischer wrote:

 > Hello, I'm not sure this is the right place to ask, but I think
 > there is a chance that someone knows the answer ;-)
 > 
 > I'm trying to use the windows binaries from http://w32tex.org/ of
 > the lcdf-typetools.
 > 
 > When calling otftotfm I get the error message
 > otftotfm: temporary file '\s1so.4': Permission denied
 > 
 > This looks as if otftotfm tries to write at the root of the drive.
 > 
 > I can avoid the problem by calling otftotfm with admin rights. I
 > probably can also avoid the problem by changing the permissions.
 > Both possibilities don't appeal to me. 
 > 
 > Has someone a idea how I could tell otftotfm to use another folder
 > for this temporary files?
 > (a setting in a texmf.cnf would be ok, otftotfm is installed in a
 > mini  texmf with kpathsea).

This mailing list is definitely the right place to ask.

The best way to determine the path to a temporary directory is to
evaluate environment variables.  On Windows the relevant variable is
%TEMP%.

otftotfm behaves as expected on Unix.  When I run 

   strace -eopen otftotfm .....

I see:

  open("/tmp/501-reinhard/otftotfm.dq6Zup", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = 3
  open("/tmp/501-reinhard/otftotfm.dq6Zup", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 4

The default temporary directory on Unix is /tmp.  However, it seems
that otftotfm is using the value of $TMPDIR, which is set to
/tmp/$UID-`whoami` at login time on my machine.

The lcdf-typetools were written for Unix.  Akira ported them to
Windows for his W32TeX distribution.  Maybe he forgot to adapt the
environment variables.

Ulrike, I'm not sure whether it works, but you could try:

  set TMPDIR=%TEMP%

I don't have Windows and thus can't test it myself.  But maybe it's
sufficient to provide an environment variable %TMPDIR% which contains
the same path as %TEMP%.

BTW, this mail is sent to Akira as well.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------