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I'm trying to install texlive 2020 on ubuntu 18.04 using the command perl install-tl I'm getting this error message,

Unknown regexp modifier "/b" at install-tl line 1, at end of line
BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at install-tl line 32.

which is very odd since install-tl does not have any line in which "/b" appears. Here are the first few lines of install-tl.

Could somebody advise please?

!/usr/bin/env perl
# $Id: texlive2020-20200406.iso,v 1.1 2020/05/17 18:09:10 simon Exp simon $
# Copyright 2007-2020
# Reinhard Kotucha, Norbert Preining, Karl Berry, Siep Kroonenberg.
# This file is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2
# or any later version.
#
# Be careful when changing wording: *every* normal informational message
# output here must be recognized by the long grep in tl-update-tlnet.

This is the version of perl I'm running

This is perl 5, version 26, subversion 1 (v5.26.1) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
Leo Simon
  • 2,199
  • The first line does contain /b. (I have no idea how to start the installer on ubuntu, I'm on windows): – Ulrike Fischer Dec 31 '20 at 21:16
  • the command is sudo apt-get install texlive, or in the store (or package manager synaptic) search for texlive lybraries or the texlive-base, and the latex editors – Alejandro Munoz Ossa Jan 01 '21 at 02:05
  • Using apt would be wonderful if it worked, but for some reason sudo apt-get install texlive installs the 2017 version. Unfortunately, I need 2019 at least, which appears to be the latest version compatible with ubuntu 18.04. Is there a way of making convincing apt to install the latest version? – Leo Simon Jan 01 '21 at 23:31
  • you are missing a # on the first line – David Carlisle Jan 02 '21 at 00:34
  • how did you obtain this script (you should not get a corrupted first line if obtaining it from the standard sources) – David Carlisle Jan 02 '21 at 00:38

1 Answers1

2

However you obtained this install script it is corrupted.

!/usr/bin/env perl

should be

#!/usr/bin/env perl

which specifies the interpreter to use on this script.

You are seeing it interpreted as /usr/b which is the regular expression /usr/ with the (bad) modifier b

David Carlisle
  • 757,742
  • Wierd, it was indeed corrupted. Rather disturbing. I downloaded another version and it ran fine! Thanks – Leo Simon Jan 03 '21 at 04:20