Processing a LaTeX file usually takes several steps. At a bare minimum, it usually requires 2 runs through latex (or pdflatex). Two runs are necessary in order to get cross-references and the table of contents right. Since LaTeX processes a page at a time, it can’t generate a table of contents on page 1 until it knows what sections, subsections etc. are in the rest of the file. That is what the .aux file is. Then on the second run, LaTeX reads that info from the .aux file. If you are running bibtex, or making an index, there are additional programs to run. Typing this from the command line (or even hitting the compile button from a GUI like TeXshop) can be tedious. I know that many people use Makefiles to achieve this task. However, as far as I know, Makefiles are specific to a particular project. That is, for every new LaTeX project, you have to create a new Makefile. Instead, I use bash scripts. This allows me to specify a filename on the command line, and I also get some more flexibility from the power of bash. I choose bash for this task, since it is mostly just stringing together commands I would perform on the command line anyways. It is also installed on most any linux machine, and on Mac OSX. (Sorry windows users, (unless you use cygwin)).
I have several different scripts, depending on what I am doing.
Traditional LaTeX
#!/bin/bash
# this script processes a latex file.
DVIPS=dvips
PDF=ps2pdf
PROG=latex
SEED=`echo $1 | cut -f1 -d"."`
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED &&
(if [ -e ${SEED}.idx ]; then
makeindex $SEED
fi) &&
(if [ $(grep bibdata ${SEED}.aux) ]; then
bibtex $SEED &&
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED &&
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED
fi) &&
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED &&
$DVIPS $SEED.dvi -t letter -Ppdf -o $SEED.ps &&
$PDF $SEED.ps &&
echo "*****************************
SUCCESSFULLY PROCESSED $SEED
*****************************" ||
echo "*****************************
PARSING PROBLEM with $SEED. run $PROG manually to see errors
*****************************"
For pdflatex
#!/bin/bash
PROG=pdflatex
SEED=`echo $1 | cut -f1 -d"."`
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED &&
(if [ -e ${SEED}.idx ]; then
makeindex $SEED
fi) &&
(if [ $(grep bibdata ${SEED}.aux) ]; then
bibtex $SEED &&
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED &&
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED
fi) &&
$PROG --shell-escape -interaction=batchmode $SEED &&
echo "*****************************
SUCCESSFULLY PROCESSED $SEED
*****************************" ||
echo "*****************************
PARSING PROBLEM with $SEED. run $PROG manually to see errors
*****************************"
You can run the scripts like so:
pdftexit myfile.tex
The .tex is optional. In fact you could use .pdf, or nothing. The extension gets stripped off. Note that as it is currently written, if you have a file like 2008.04.11.tex, it will break, since it splits by period, and only takes the first part. A way around this would be to use basename instead, but that would not work for files named anything other than .tex.
Also note that I suppress most of latex’s output by using the -interaction=batchmode option. By default LaTeX prints out quite a bit of information, and printing to the screen can really slow things down. If something goes wrong, then you can always run it once manually. The script will detect if something goes wrong and tell you.
I hope you find the scripts useful. For convenience, here is zip file with both bash scripts.