work with spaces in file name

[ArborealAnole]

Remove double quotes from \ip@file with \StrSubstitute from xstring package.

I would like to compile a tex file test 2.tex which contains:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{svg}

\begin{document}
Lorem ipsum\dots
\end{document}

I make the same call that latexmk makes:

pdflatex  -synctex=1 -shell-escape -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error -recorder -output-directory="/home/user/test dir"  "/home/user/test dir/test 2.tex"

Errors including the following occur (line 378):

/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/ifplatform/ifplatform.sty:92: Package catchfile Error: File `"test 2".w18' not found.

It seems \ip@file evaluates to "test 2".w18. I believe this first error is because sh -c 'uname -s > ""test 2".w18"' results only in uname -s > test 2.w18 i.e. uname -s 2.w18 > test (inferred from strace):

uname: extra operand ‘2.w18’
Try 'uname --help' for more information.

Other errors such as the following then occur as a byproduct but I don't understand why--would \@tempa have a } in it? (line 383):

/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/ifplatform/ifplatform.sty:94: Argument of \zap@space has an extra }.
...

I am using TeX Live. I also get these errors when using LuaLaTeX with minted.

latexmk says Latexmk: Errors, so I did not complete making targets. It also retries compilation once more for LuaLatex.

Rather than try to escape the quotes when calling uname and so on, I simply removed the quotes from \ip@file at the top of ifplatform.sty by including xstring and using StrSubstitute as in this file change.

I confirmed that test 2.w18 is created and removed during compilation. This change removed all errors when using regular LaTeX and LuaLaTeX with minted.

A cleaner way to fix this may be to instead only replace all " with ' on lines 377 and 379, but CatchFile apparently wipes the two quotation marks either advertently or inadvertently by the time it calls openat(AT_FDCWD,"/home/user/test dir/test 2.tex",O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) and access, resulting in /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/ifplatform/ifplatform.sty:96: Package catchfile Error: File '"test 2".w18' not found.. For the case that a user has quotes in their filename, is no point in say only removing the first and last quote if there are spaces in the file name (implying LaTeX added quotes to the jobname), because quotes in a path may create an error from CatchFile anyway.

1. What is the rationale for enclosing the job name in literal quotes within \jobname?
2. What is typically the actual effect of these errors aside from messing up latexmk? It seems like minted is able to use its shell escapes effectively despite them. Is \linuxtrue default?
3. Given that other files like test 2.pdf, test 2.aux, etc. are all named without quotes around the base file name, how do the other subsystems of LaTeX handle the quotes imposed by \jobname if they do use \jobname; and what do they use to get the file name if not?

[wspr]

Oh dear, this is a can of worms. I’m not too comfortable making changes here without extensive cross-platform testing. Until recently the standard reply for anyone trying to use spaces in filenames was easy: don’t :) FWIW the double quote character is special in TeX filenames. It is never interpreted as a literal character; it is only used for quoting. Getting it right in the shells in another can of worms.

[Luis-Licea]

I think this is an important pull request. It worked perfectly for me in Linux. I can build files with spaces now.

However, I understand this also need to be tested in Windows, BSD, and macOS. Would testing through a virtual machine be ok?

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• BSD