Re: environment variable

Reinhard Kotucha <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.tex.tetex.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>>>>> "Vladimir" == Vladimir Volovich <[email protected]> writes:

  > since when did TeX know anything about arbitrary environment
  > variables like HOME, and allowed to transparently and naively use
  > them in TeX documents? your statement that "in our documents we
  > have often something like \usepackage{$HOME/path...}", and that
  > works in teTeX 1.0, seems very unlikely to be true.

Some years ago I had been experimenting with things like this and it
worked indeed.  It didn't work with arbitrary variables, but in this
case $HOME is part of the filename.

I suppose that formerly the filename had been passed to a shell (which
expanded $HOME) and nowadays a system call is used instead.

TeX itself never expanded env-vars.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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