[tex-live] Gow

[Robert Eckl]

Hi Reinhard,

Reinhard Kotucha wrote: 

>Hi,
>a few days ago Rolf Niepraschk pointed me to
>
>  http://wiki.github.com/bmatzelle/gow/
>
> > Gow (Gnu On Windows) is the lightweight alternative to Cygwin. It  >
uses a convenient Windows installer that installs about 130  > extremely
useful open source UNIX applications compiled as native  > win32 binaries.
It is designed to be as small as possible, about 10  > MB, as opposed to
Cygwin which can run well over 100 MB depending  > upon options.
>
...
>
>I don't have access to a Windows system and can't test anything myself.
But I've seen that Gow provides the program "ln".  I'm wondering what it
does.  Does ln -s create a .lnk file?  This is what Cygwin does and
symlinks work like on Unix there.
>
>Could anybody install Gow (at least the programs ln and ls) and tell me
whether this works:
>
>  1. cd /path/to/texlive/20xx/bin/win32
>
>  2. del pdflatex.exe
>
>  3. ln -s pdftex.exe pdflatex.exe 
>
>  4. pdflatex --version
>
My result is:
   MiKTeX-pdfTeX 2.8.3759 (1.40.10) (MiKTeX 2.8)
   Copyright (C) 1982 D. E. Knuth, (C) 1996-2006 Han The Thanh
   TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society.

This means, pdflatex in the current directory is not found, it is found in
PATH  (behind TeXLives PATH)
>
>And what is the result of "ls -l pdflatex"?  Do you see something like
"pdflatex -> pdftex"?
>
ls: pdflatex: No such file or directory

but ls -l pdflatex* results to

lr--r--r--  1 Robert 0 529 2010-07-31 23:24 pdflatex.exe.lnk ->
H:/texlive/2010/bin/win32/pdftex.exe

and then:

pdflatex.exe.lnk --version  results to

pdfTeX 3.1415926-1.40.11-2.2 (Web2C 2010)
kpathsea version 6.0.0
Copyright 2010 Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the pdfTeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the pdfTeX source.
Primary author of pdfTeX: Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh
(pdfTeX).
Compiled with libpng 1.4.3; using libpng 1.4.3
Compiled with zlib 1.2.5; using zlib 1.2.5
Compiled with xpdf version 3.02pl4


>Don't be worried if it doesn't work.  You can always restore
>pdflatex.exe: 
>
>  cd /path/to/texlive/20xx/bin/win32
>  copy /b pdftex.exe pdflatex.exe
>
First, it wasn´t possible to delete the link. But i could solve it.

My system is WIN XP 5.1.2600 (home), AFAIK with all SPs.

Another try

ln -s -S=exe pdftex.exe pdflatex

this results to pdflatex.lnk

All the links in the explorer are shown without the suffix .lnk  

Here is the result of ln --help

Usage: ln [OPTION]... [-T] TARGET LINK_NAME   (1st form)
  or:  ln [OPTION]... TARGET                  (2nd form)
  or:  ln [OPTION]... TARGET... DIRECTORY     (3rd form)
  or:  ln [OPTION]... -t DIRECTORY TARGET...  (4th form)
In the 1st form, create a link to TARGET with the name LINK_NAME.
In the 2nd form, create a link to TARGET in the current directory.
In the 3rd and 4th forms, create links to each TARGET in DIRECTORY.
Create hard links by default, symbolic links with --symbolic.
When creating hard links, each TARGET must exist.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
      --backup[=CONTROL]      make a backup of each existing destination
file
  -b                          like --backup but does not accept an
argument
  -d, -F, --directory         allow the superuser to attempt to hard link
                                directories (note: will probably fail due
to
                                system restrictions, even for the
superuser)
  -f, --force                 remove existing destination files
  -n, --no-dereference        treat destination that is a symlink to a
                                directory as if it were a normal file
  -i, --interactive           prompt whether to remove destinations
  -s, --symbolic              make symbolic links instead of hard links
  -S, --suffix=SUFFIX         override the usual backup suffix
  -t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY  specify the DIRECTORY in which to
create
                                the links
  -T, --no-target-directory   treat LINK_NAME as a normal file
  -v, --verbose               print name of each file before linking
      --help     display this help and exit
      --version  output version information and exit

The backup suffix is `~', unless set with --suffix or
SIMPLE_BACKUP_SUFFIX.
The version control method may be selected via the --backup option or
through
the VERSION_CONTROL environment variable.  Here are the values:

  none, off       never make backups (even if --backup is given)
  numbered, t     make numbered backups
  existing, nil   numbered if numbered backups exist, simple otherwise
  simple, never   always make simple backups

Report bugs to <bug-coreutils at gnu.org>.


HTH,
Robert