Re: Problem with kpsewhich on a new instal

Hi Max,

But why would the TL installer take it in and proceed with the entire
installation?

PN

On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 9:58 PM Max Chernoff <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Paulo,
>
> On Sun, 2026-05-17 at 18:10 -0700, Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:
> > I do need to use a PATH relative to my home directory because the admin's
> > on the machine move users home directories frequently... and in fact,
> most
> > things are broken:
> >
> > $ which lualatex
> > ~/usr/local/texlive/2026/bin/x86_64-linux/lualatex
>
> Tilde expansion is a shell feature, so I'm rather surprised that this
> ever worked at all. You never mentioned what your $PATH is exactly, but
> I'm guessing that your ".<shell>rc" file has something like the
> following in it:
>
>     export PATH=~/some/path:/usr/bin
>
> I'd suggest that you replace that with
>
>     export PATH=$HOME/some/path:/usr/bin
>
> then your $PATH will always only have absolute paths, while still
> adapting to any changes in the location of your home directory.
>
> On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 5:51 PM Paulo Ney de Souza <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > I thought I had seen this some 20 years ago ... is this something that
> > will be fixed?
>
> Karl will be the one who decides what to do here, but I'd argue that the
> current behaviour is correct, since this matches the GNU coreutils's
> behaviour:
>
>     $ mkdir -p ~/testing
>     $ cd ~/testing/
>     $ printf '#!/bin/sh\necho "Hello, world!"\n' > test.sh
>     $ chmod a+x test.sh
>     $ PATH="/usr/bin/:~/testing" env test.sh
>     env: ‘test.sh’: No such file or directory
>     $ PATH="/usr/bin/:$HOME/testing" env test.sh
>     Hello, world!
>
> Plus, "~" is a perfectly valid character to use in a filename (and is
> notably used in Windows for short path names), so if we were to expand
> it, we would need to make sure to only expand it if it's at the start of
> a $PATH component. The path parsing code in kpathsea is
> security-sensitive since it's what ultimately determines if a program is
> allowed to run when restricted shell-escape is active, so the fewer
> special cases we need there, the better.
>
> Thanks,
> -- Max
>