[tex-live] BIBINPUTS and quoted pathes

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Thu May 4 23:36:13 CEST 2017


On 2017-05-02 at 12:05:36 +0200, Ulrike Fischer wrote:

 > Am Mon, 1 May 2017 22:11:48 +0900 schrieb Akira Kakuto:
 > 
 > Dear  Akira,
 > 
 > >> BIBINPUTS="C:\Users\XXX\Documents\tests\tex"
 > >>
 > >> C:\Users\XXX\Documents\tests>bibtex test-utf8
 > >> This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2017/W32TeX)
 > >> The top-level auxiliary file: test-utf8.aux
 > >> The style file: plain.bst
 > >> I couldn't open database file testxxxxx.bib
 > >>
 > >>
 > >> Is this to be expected. And if yes how do one set it then for pathes
 > >> with spaces?
 >  
 > > Yes that is expected, because BIBINPUTS is
 > > "C:\Users\XXX\Documents\tests\tex" including quotation mark " in cmd.exe,
 > > that is not an existing path.
 > > In the case of paths with spaces, setting it is easy:
 > > set BIBINPUTS=C:/Users/XXX YYY ZZZ/Documents/tests/tex//;C:/other dirs/a//
 > 
 > Thanks -- but I wished they never had allowed the damn spaces, quote
 > or not to quote is always the question. 

The "damn spaces" are allowed because users of GUIs expect them to be
allowed.  They want to use comprehesible file names and don't want to
care about the underlying operating system.

Hence avoiding spaces completely is neither desired nor possible.
Both, operating systems and programs have to support them.

Unix avoids spaces in file names completely but allows users to use
them for their own files.  Given that improper quoting is risky, this
is certainly a good compromise.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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