Re: tex broken (solved)

[David Wainberg <david@altruistek.com>]

You nailed it, Florian. Thanks

I had messed up the environment variables when I was trying to add new
cls files. However, the problem only showed up -- presumably -- after
a reboot, or maybe after restarting X after an upgrade. Anyway, it was
working immediately after I'd been messing with it, so I didn't make
the connection.

Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl> writes:

> 1) Can root run "latex template.tex" without errors? If it is a problem
> of environmental variables, it might even make a difference if you use
> su or if you log in as root on a console. You could also try to generate
> a new user and see if latex behaves differently when you log in as that
> user.

The key was, as you suggested, to log in as root. I guess, then, that
su-ing still picks up the regular user's env variables. (I didn't know
that before.)

> 2) Run "mktexlsr" as root. This should make tex rebuild its index of
> files. Does the behavior change after that, do you get any informative
> error messages?
> 
> 3) "env | grep -i tex" will tell you if you have any environmental
> variables which might affect the behavior of tex.

And another thing I learned. I did not know about the env command. Now
I do. That's how I found the problem.

Thanks much,

-David