Speed up the work by shell scripts II
15 July 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz
In addition to the shell scripts mentioned in this post I wrote another small script:
#!/bin/bash # texcd - change into the directory # corresponding to a certain tex related file if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then echo 1>&2 Usage: . texcd filename [pattern] echo 1>&2 examples: . texcd beamer.cls exit 1 fi cd `kpsewhich $1 | sed 's/\(.*\)\/.*$/\1/'` echo Changed to: `pwd`
It’s purpose is to change into the directory where a certain tex related file resides. For instance if you want to search through some beamer class theme files, you don’t have to know the directory, just type
. texcd beamer.cls
and you will enter (for instance) the directory /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/base/. The dot at the beginning of the command is important. Thats one reason why I show this small script too. Normally if you change the directory inside a script, after the script is finished you will be back inside the directory where you were before, because the script starts a new shell for itself. If you want to run the commands inside your current shell you can use the source command, the dot I’ve used is just an abbreviation for source.
Some additional hints I didn’t mention in the other post: instead of putting the scripts into your home directory you could copy them into your local file system, for instance:
sudo cp texcd /usr/local/bin/
and those scripts should be made executable using chmod:
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/texcd
Thats recommendable for the other scripts too.
This entry was posted on 15 July 2008 at 7:41 PM and is filed under Tools for LaTeX, Linux/ Ubuntu Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
15 July 2008 at 8:17 PM
A better way is using a shell function instead of a script:
function texcd (){
cd $(dirname "$(kpsewhich "$1")");
}
Adding this to ~/.profile allows you to write
texcd beamer.clsat the command line. Error handling is left as exercise to the reader.
16 July 2008 at 7:59 PM
Hi Michael,
thank you for your constructive comment. This shell function is working fine with bash. I would rather put this function into ~/.bashrc instead of ~/.profile, because ~/.profile may be executed by other shells like sh. sh stops with Syntax error: “(” unexpected, that may even prevent login to an X session, except in safe mode.
Btw. I added code-Tags to your comment to improve readability, else the quotation marks might cause a problem if a reader tries copy&paste.