[OS X TeX] LatexIt 1.15.0 and MacTex errors

[Martin Costabel]

Peter Dyballa wrote:
[]
> Right! So the question is, why LaTeXiT is creating a login or 
> interactive shell> .
[]
> Actually I, a stubborn tcsh (and GNU Emacs) user, am not seeing this – 

Don't feel too smug. Just for laughs, create a file ~/.bash_profile 
containing the 3 (nonsensical, but syntactically correct and harmless) lines

dummyfunction () {
   if [ " two times two" != "four" ]; then exit; fi
}

Can't harm you, you are a tcsh user? Well, try to use latexit ;-)

Honestly, this is a serious bug in latexit. Trying to get the user login 
shell environment by running

   /bin/bash -l -c set

as latexit does it, is bound to fail. There are many ways to run a 
similarly simple command that does this correctly, for example

   /bin/bash --posix -l -c set
   /bin/bash -l -c /usr/bin/env
   /bin/bash -l -c /usr/bin/printenv

Anyway, for tcsh users, this whole exercice is useless, because it won't 
get *their* login environment.

The problem this tries to solve is classical on MacOSX: How to transmit 
the user shell login environment from a MacOS app started via the 
Finder? Some apps use "/usr/bin/login -fp" to start scripts with the 
right environment.

-- 
Martin