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I know that there is a problem with spaces in the name of .bib files. Nonetheless, the following MWE compiles perfectly fine if one does the normal latex -> bibtex -> latex -> latex compilation sequence by hand, regardless of whether there are spaces in the name of the .tex file.

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: bibtex
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{natbib}

\begin{document}

\citet{friederici1993}

\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliography{master}

\end{document}

However, as soon as one tries to compile this MWE with arara and if there are spaces in the name of the .tex file, it will not work. It seems to be a problem with reading from the .aux file, as per the error message:

Running BibTeX...

I couldn't open file name `"2014-01-24 Friederici et al 1993 Presentation.aux".aux'
FAILURE

Is there are a workaround, or is this unavoidable? Does one have to use file names without spaces for .tex files if one is using arara to compile?

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Adam Liter
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    As far as i know, arara does not support spaces in filenames for good reasons. That's a feature, not a bug. Remove the spaces, and i think everything is going to be fine. http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13311129#13311129 – Johannes_B Jan 22 '14 at 18:43
  • @Johannes_B it does indeed work after the spaces are removed. I was just curious if there is a way to retain spaces in .tex file names when using arara. I don't necessarily know why it would be a feature, but I also don't know that much about file naming schemes, file structures, etc., so it's perhaps no surprise that I can't think up a reason why it would be considered a feature. Could you clarify why it would be a feature? – Adam Liter Jan 22 '14 at 18:49
  • @Johannes_B Hahah, thanks for link! :) – Adam Liter Jan 22 '14 at 18:52
  • If you look at the date: It was just yesterday, read a bit and i think your question will be answered. You can take a look at the chat log from when your question was posted as well ;-) – Johannes_B Jan 22 '14 at 18:53
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    @Johannes_B if you want to turn this into an answer, I'd be happy to accept it. If you do, you should mention that I deserve no sympathy. :) I thought that was pretty entertaining. – Adam Liter Jan 22 '14 at 19:08
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    Related Naming LaTeX files: best practice? also see examples of filenames – texenthusiast Jan 22 '14 at 19:09

1 Answers1

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First of all, an interesting remark: it's quite surprising and amusing that this fact went unnoticed for virtually every single release of arara. I blame Nicola, of course: once she found this major issue, apparently the universe captured an unbalanced force and decided to go ballistic. :)

As retaliation, Nicola is now part of the official arara team. ♥

This is clearly a bug and major issue of the current version of arara (3.0 as the time of writing). To be more precise, the culprit is actually one of the libraries arara relies on, and not the tool itself. If we check arara.log (via --log), we can check that the command is being correctly expanded, say

pdflatex "file with spaces.tex"

Rules are actually written with that concern in mind, but I really had no idea the underlying code would fail me. :) Interestingly enough, the above call works. So, for some commands, like pdflatex, the execution works; for others, like makeindex, makeglossaries (the one that made Nicola spot the looney the issue) and bibtex, execution falls flat on its face.

I'm studying a way to fix this, and apparently the folks at Apache are aware of the bug in their execution library, but there's no solution so far that doesn't involve a lot of hacking. I know this is quite frustrating, and the only workaround is to, well, avoid spaces in filenames. :)

Sorry for the trouble. I'm now aware of the problem and will look forward to a solution.

Paulo Cereda
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