4

Please, explain why it asks something like this.

$ latex full.tex
...

l.5 \begin{document}

(Press Enter to retry, or Control-D to exit; default file extension is `.tex')
Please type another output file name:

.full.tex -file

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\section{Hello 1}

hello my name is \"{a}.

\section{hello my 2}

dad  \"{o}aeoeu\"{a}!

\end{document}

[Comment] not writing -permission issue or privilege -issue

$ ls -lsa .full.tex 
4 -rwxrwxrwx 1 tester tester 160 2011-09-24 02:42 .full.tex

Alert: Do not do this on your machine, abusing root.

# latex .full.tex 
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
entering extended mode
(./.full.tex
LaTeX2e <2009/09/24>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax, dumylang, noh
yphenation, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
No file .full.aux.
latex: Not writing to .full.aux (openout_any = p).
! I can't write on file `.full.aux'.
\document ...ate \openout \@mainaux \jobname .aux 
                                                  \immediate \write \@mainau...
l.5 \begin{document}

(Press Enter to retry, or Control-D to exit; default file extension is `.tex')

P.s. I forget to mention -- I am using 11.04 Ubuntu at the moment, not yet tried on other machines. Maybe OS-related prob.

hhh
  • 8,743

1 Answers1

8

The problem is the dot in the file name. Your document's name is .full.tex and this is triggering the error message. Simply rename the file deleting the initial dot.

Or, when prompted to give another output file name, provide a name such as full.tex.

Gonzalo Medina
  • 505,128
  • why not ".full.tex"? It would be so easy to compile "$ cat *.tex > .full.tex" and then just "$ latex .*" -- I currently name my chapters as "1.tex", "2.tex" etc -- well I will do just "$ cat [0-9]*.tex > full.tex $ latex full.tex", good enough. – hhh Sep 24 '11 at 00:02
  • 5
    Outputting dot files is a security issue: a malicious TeX source could change important files such as .profile; remember that TeX overwrites existing files when it starts writing its output, without asking for permission. – egreg Sep 24 '11 at 07:52