Unitialized variable

Mike Maxwell mmaxwell at umd.edu
Tue Sep 26 21:53:54 CEST 2023


Last night I downloaded and installed the 2023 TeXLive distro onto my 
WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux, v22) system.  (This was a new install, 
not an update.)  When I got done, I realized I had forgotten to set the 
default paper size to 8 1/2 x 11, so I followed the instructions under 
the "Post-install: setting the default paper size" heading here:
     https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html
--namely, I ran
      tlmgr paper letter
It chugged for a long time, and everything seems to have gone ok, until 
the very end, when I got this msg at the command line:
------------
Use of uninitialized value $_[4] in join or string at 
/usr/local/texlive/2023/bin/x86_64-linux/fmtutil line 374.
fmtutil [ERROR]: running `xetex -ini   -jobname=pdfcsplain 
-progname=pdfcsplain -etex csplain.ini </dev/null' return status: 127
fmtutil [ERROR]: returning error due to option --strict
fmtutil [INFO]: disabled formats: 3
fmtutil [INFO]: successfully rebuilt formats: 48
fmtutil [INFO]: not selected formats: 3
fmtutil [INFO]: failed to build: 1 (xetex/pdfcsplain)
fmtutil [INFO]: total formats: 55
fmtutil [INFO]: exiting with status 1
tlmgr: An error has occurred. See above messages. Exiting.
-------------
I'm unsure whether it was really the last step, or whether the whole 
thing just bombed out when this error happened.

I'm not a perl programmer, but I looked up the place referenced in 
fmtutil, which is this function:
----------
sub log_to_status {
   if ($STATUS_FH) {
     print $STATUS_FH "@_\n"; #line 374
   }
}
----------

I guess I could uninstall the whole TeXLive installation and re-install 
it, this time telling it to use letter-sized paper from the beginning. 
But that seems a pain...  Or I could re-run `tlmgr paper letter` again, 
and hope that this time it works.

My system has perl version 5.34.0, which seems a tad old.  Although I'm 
not sure that would fix an uninstantiated variable issue.

Or maybe there's a known fix for this?

     Mike Maxwell


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