[texdoc] error on missing display

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard mpg at elzevir.fr
Sat Feb 20 13:16:29 CET 2010


Karl Berry a écrit :
> I accidentally ran "texdoc etex" on a remote server where $DISPLAY
> wasn't set, and got the following error msgs:
> 
>     xprop:  unable to open display ''
>     usage:  xprop [-options ...] [[format [dformat]] atom] ...
> 
>     where options include:
>     ...
> ../texlive/karl/Master/texmf/scripts/texdoc/config.tlu:388: bad argument #1 to 'find' (string expected, got nil)
> 
Oops.

> Doesn't really matter, but it's not the friendliest :).

Sure. The fix was barely 2 lines anyway. Now texdoc should work properly in list
and showall mode in this case. Of course, if you try to view the document, your
pdf reader will complain in some way. With xpdf, I get:

mpg at roth:~% unset DISPLAY
mpg at roth:~% texdoc --view live
mpg at roth:~% Error: Can't open display:

which is not the friendliest either, because the user has no clue which program
is issuing the error message. But now it's xpdf's fault, not mine :-)

Manuel.


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