[18955] in Athena Bugs
xdvi and netscape oddness
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Emily Marcus)
Thu May 17 11:51:57 2001
To: bugs@mit.edu
From: Emily Marcus <emarcus@MIT.EDU>
Date: 17 May 2001 11:51:54 -0400
Message-ID: <v9m7kzgnfc5.fsf@m56-129-21.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
I was referred to this list to report an oddness with xdvi.
I'm on one of the linux cluster machines. If I run
xdvi foo.tex &
(rather than foo.dvi), it gives the expected error message
athena% xdvi foo.tex &
[1] 13148
athena% Could not open dvi file. Exiting.
However, it then proceeds to attempt to start netscape to look at the
url file:foo.tex. This seems like a rather strange behavior. It does
this only if the file has the extension .tex; xdvi foo just gives the
expected error.
I'm running /usr/athena/bin/xdvi on m56-129-21.mit.edu, but I also got
someone (dmaze) on pickled-herring to try it and they experienced the
same behavior. It doesn't seem to matter whether foo.tex or foo.dvi
actually exists or not.
Is this an expected behavior? The version of xdvi in the newtex
locker does not seem to do this; the version in the sipb locker does
seem to try to do this. Looking at the wrapper scripts didn't seem
enlightening.
Is this supposed to be a feature? It's rather annoying, especially
since it doesn't actually come up with the .tex file, just an error,
even when the file exists. (I realize that xdvi-ing tex files is
rather stupid in the first place, but it seems like a common typo/user
error.)
Thanks,
Emily
