Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 17:58:26 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii To: Olivier PERRON cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: In TeX, what is the default value for $TEXINPUTS ? In-Reply-To: <3458487F.34DA@art.alcatel.fr> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On Thu, 30 Oct 1997, Olivier PERRON wrote: > I needed to know this value, because the installing process needs to use > some specific directories BEFORE the standards one. The way to do this > is to set the TEXINPUTS variable and declaring the specific directories > FIRST. There are better ways, all of them described in the docs. You really should spend some time reading the (excellent, IMHO) documentation of the Kpathsea library used by all TeX programs to search for files. It describes all the various ways of customizing search paths. From the DOS prompt, type "info kpathsea" and read there. The easiest way to customize $TEXINPUTS is to edit the file %DJDIR%/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf (where %DJDIR% is the top of your TeX/DJGPP installation). > After very long multiple tries, I found that a default setting for > TEXINPUTS could be : > $TEXMF/tex/plain/base;$TEXMF/tex/latex/misc/base;$TEXMF/tex/generic/hyphen This is close, but not entirely correct. The default value of TEXINPUTS is ".;$TEXMF/tex//". The double-slash at the end means that ALL the subdirectories of $TEXMF/tex are also recursively searched. Btw, I don't understand why did you need ``long multiple tries'' to find that out. The package has a program called `kpsewhich' exactly for these cases. It took me, like, two seconds to get the answer using the folloiwng command: kpsewhich -expand-var=$TEXINPUTS Again, you should read the docs to know about these possibilities. TeX is a very complex package, and you really shouldn't try changing the default setup without reading the docs.