KPSEWHICH(1)

💖 KPSEWHICH(1) — the General Commands Manual glow-up 💖

okay bestie, this is kpsewhich, from the General Commands Manual section of your local man tree. she's the standalone girlie for path lookup and and expansion for kpathsea. (yes the double "and" is canon, i don't make the rules 💅)

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✨ NAME ✨

kpsewhich — standalone path lookup and and expansion for kpathsea

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

kpsewhich [options] [filenames]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so first things first, this manual page is not meant to be exhaustive. the full ✨complete✨ documentation for this version of TeX lives in the info file or manual Kpathsea: A library for path searching. so if you need the deep lore, that's where you go, not here.

kpsewhich is the standalone front-end of the kpathsea library, and she has two whole jobs: examining variables and finding files. main character energy fr.

here's the tea on how she searches 👇 when the -format option is not given, the search path she uses when looking for a file is inferred from the name you gave her, by looking for a known extension. and if no known extension is found? she just uses the search path for TeX source files. no cap.

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

kpsewhich accepts the following options, and yes we're doing all of them, no skips:

• -debug num — Set debugging flags.
• -D num — Use a base resolution of num; the default, set by the installer, is typically 600.
• -dpi num — As -D.
• -engine string — Set $engine in the environment, which is used in some search paths.
• -expand-braces string — Print variable and brace expansion of string.
• -expand-path string — Print complete path expansion of string.
• -expand-var string — Print variable expansion of string.
• -format name — Use file type name. See the info manual for a list of valid names, or use the -help option to print the list.
• -help — Print help message and exit.
• -interactive — Ask for additional filenames to look up.
• -mktex fmt — enable mktexfmt generation. (fmt=pk/mf/tex/tfm)
• -mode string — Set device name for $MAKETEX_MODE to string; no default.
• -must-exist — Search the disk as well as ls-R if necessary.
• -no-mktex fmt — disable mktexfmt generation. (fmt=pk/mf/tex/tfm)
• -path string — Search in the path string.
• -progname string — Set program name to string.
• -show-path name — Output search path for file type name. See the info manual for a list of valid names, or use the -help option to print the list.
• -var-value variable — Print the expansion of variable.
• -version — Print version information and exit.

pro tip from me to you: -format and -show-path both want a valid name, and neither of them is gonna guess it for you — hit up the info manual or just run -help and let her list them. 🫶

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

go give these iconics some love too:

• mktexlsr(1)
• mktexmf(1)
• mktexpk(1)
• mktextfm(1)

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate it 💖 this was Kpathsea 6.4.1, dated 1 March 2011, and that's the kpsewhich manual, periodt. now go find some files. 🎀✨