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My windows 7 warned me that biber.exe tried to establish incoming connection. I wonder why biber would need it? I blocked the connection for a while.

Igor Kotelnikov
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1 Answers1

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biber is a Perl script and to make it run without installing the needed Perl libraries, the exe comes with all libraries which must be extracted from the file. This happens only once. However, I am not a windows user, so that I do not really know what biber checks for windows.

  • Indeed, bibber.exe is rather big (13Mb). However, I haven't seen any indication of unpacking and installing something during first run. So, I will keep it blocked by Windows firewall. – Igor Kotelnikov Feb 27 '11 at 16:07
  • On Linux it extracts all files into the tmp directory. The reason why the first biber run always takes a long time. –  Feb 27 '11 at 16:15
  • @Igor: It does unpack on first run (as @Herbert says), but I think the net access thing is just a Perl standard check and is not actually required. – Joseph Wright Feb 27 '11 at 16:47
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    I'd be very interested to see what it was trying to do - I'm the current biber maintainer and I wrote the packaging/distribution code. As mentioned by others, the reason the binary is large is because this is essentially a whole perl tree, including interpreter which unpacks on first run to a temp location (see the very clever PAR::Packer perl module). There is nothing in biber itself that would make a network connection but perhaps something in the PAR::Packer framework or the LWP libraries does. Nothing to worry about though. – PLK Mar 04 '11 at 19:49