Re: /bin in path before /usr/bin breaks latex

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 4/26/2012 11:05 AM, Mark Frazer wrote:
> Updating cygwin yesterday broke several of my scripts.  Turns out this
> was because they have /bin before /usr/bin in their PATH exported to
> child processes which broke latex.
>
> To reproduce:
>    env PATH=/bin:"$PATH" latex manual.tex
>
> Seems that the latex related symlinks in /bin do not function.
> Putting /usr/bin in the path first fixes this.

This has nothing to do with symlinks.  You have the same problem if you 
try to run /bin/pdftex directly.  Furthermore, the files in /bin are the 
same as those in /usr/bin (see /etc/fstab), so you can't remove files or 
symlinks in /bin without also removing them from /usr/bin.

The problem here is that the tex-related binaries don't find the 
configuration file /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf when invoked as 
/bin/* rather than /usr/bin/*.  I'll fix this and release an updated 
texlive package shortly.

Ken


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