[tex-live] kpsewhich search order and how to change it

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sat Nov 17 00:46:58 CET 2007


    Indifferent of where the information came from, though, isn't it
    extremely odd that kpsewhere gives my ~/texmf/* results first for
    both files and kpsewhich returns different texmfs?

No, although I can see why it's surprising.  kpsewhere is just a shell
script that calls kpsewhich on each element in TEXMF:

    for path in `kpsewhich --expand-path='$TEXMF'`
    do
        eval TEXMF=\$path kpsewhich $options \"\$file\"
    done

It shows all files by the same name in different trees.  I don't exactly
know what good this is.  The stated purpose is to check for conflicts,
but since it doesn't report conflicts within a single texmf tree, it's
less than optimal.  

Karl


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