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It was hard to find a machine not running bash, a measure of the success of free software. But I eventually found a nearby Solaris
more a measure of the lack of diversity ... imagine everyone living a house of the same design, driving the same car, etc etc
Or instead walking, cycling, or taking public transit...but I dream.
can you try: ...
I ran this ruby script (on Linux): def locatedlocaltree tree = `kpsewhich --expand-path $TEXMFLOCAL`.chomp rescue nil unless tree && FileTest.directory?(tree) then tree = `kpsewhich --expand-path $TEXMF`.chomp rescue nil end return tree end print locatedlocaltree+"\n" and got the error due to lack of quotes around $TEXMF{,LOCAL}: kpsewhich: option `--expand-path' requires an argument kpsewhich: option `--expand-path' requires an argument Unix definitely needs those quotes to protect the variables in the backquoted command from the shell. Also the 'rescue nil' doesn't seem to have any effect. Probably similar to system(), the `cmd` construct doesn't raise an exception if the command fails or even isn't found. Instead you get tree equal to the empty string, since `` captures (the empty) stdout. Is path expansion (instead of variable expansion) a risky change? It might make tree a colon-separated list. That will cause trouble for the directory test in the 'unless' clause, and also break later uses of the returned value of locatedlocaltree that assume it is one path element. -Sanjoy `Never underestimate the evil of which men of power are capable.' --Bertrand Russell, _War Crimes in Vietnam_, chapter 1.