[OS X TeX] Muddled paths

[Herbert Schulz]

On Feb 17, 2010, at 5:35 AM, Theo Moore wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a unix-system-type question and I'm a bit of a dunce so please
> hand-hold me through the answer.
> 
> I recently updated from MacTeX 2008 to MacTeX 2009 (including deleting
> the old 2008 distribution). I ran into this problem, which may be
> unrelated to the upgrade, but may instead be due to my having messed
> with Fink and Macports a while ago.
> 
> Essentially, when I type "which pdflatex", it gives me the path
> "/sw/bin/" (indeed I have a pdflatex file in there). I believe this is
> the remnants of my playing around with Fink and Macports. Compiling
> documents using this pdflatex does not work (many packages are not
> found). However, compiling with "/usr/texbin/pdflatex filename.tex"
> works perfectly.
> 
> So my guess is that the stuff in /sw/bin/ is an old TexLive
> distribution installed from Macports and Fink. My question how do I
> safely remove this stuff and associate the right paths to the relevant
> tex commands?
> 
> Thanks!

Howdy,

Yep... Fink prepends it's path in your ~/bash_profile, ~.bash_login or ~.proflie, in that order if it exists and you are using the bash shell. that means the pdflatex in /sw/bin/ is found first. Look for the line

test -r /sw/bin/init.sh && . /sw/bin/init.sh

in at least one of the files above and either comment it out if you don't have any other Fink distribution items or add the line

export PATH=/usr/texbin:${PATH}

just after that line.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)