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Ok, let's write a document!

$ vim thesis.tex
i[input a whole bunch of latex and text]<Esc>ZZ
$ pdflatex thesis
$ ls
thesis.acn  thesis.alg  thesis.bbl  thesis.dvi  thesis.glo  thesis.ilg
thesis.ist  thesis.pdf  thesis.toc  thesis.acr  thesis.aux  thesis.blg
thesis.glg  thesis.gls  thesis.ind  thesis.log  thesis.tex

What are all of these files? I only wanted my document!

Ok, ok, so you can see that I've used pdflatex and latex, and I'm obviously using a few common packages (e.g. glossaries) and bibtex. Nevertheless, it'd be great to know what these files (and similar files for other common packages) are for, and whether there's any reason to keep them.

naught101
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    Note: there are other questions like this, with answers. But they contain different files. Ideally, it'd be good to have a single question with many common file types listed, but I don't know then best way to do that. Also, perhaps this should be community wiki? – naught101 Apr 25 '12 at 09:11
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    You don't have a thesis.idx? (And no .lof, .lot, .toc, .tmb,...?) But I really support your idea of a CW question/answer list for this! – Stephen Apr 25 '12 at 10:01
  • @Stephen: no, I don't have any of those. Feel free to add them to the ls output :) – naught101 Apr 25 '12 at 10:23
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    I think it'd be best to expand the other question, which you pointed to, to cover more extensions. It's actually good to expand questions to make them canonical. Thankfully, the other question is abstract and broad enough to allow for such expansion. As a result, this question here should probably be closed as a duplicate. – doncherry Apr 25 '12 at 10:56
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    @doncherry ok, that's fine by me. I was just thinking that the two answers there are already question-specific, and it might be easier to start with a blank slate. – naught101 Apr 25 '12 at 11:03
  • I support the idea of (1) leaving the other question as is, and (2) answering this one with community-wiki answers, one for each extension that can appear in the document folder and links to the corresponding packages, if applicable. – yo' Apr 25 '12 at 11:27
  • It might be a bit long if it's one answer per extension. Perhaps one answer per package (eg. glossary) or program (tex, latex, bibtex, etc.)? That way they're categorised quite nicely too. – naught101 Apr 25 '12 at 13:04
  • @tohecz: But how would this question not be a duplicate of the other? I like to think of it like this: As time goes on, the focus of a question stops being on solving the OP's problem and goes towards building a wiki-like database of knowledge. It's perfectly plausible that the OP of the other question would've included other file types, so it's really not a big change to include them in the other question. To get answers, I'd probably mark the edit in the question as such. – doncherry Apr 25 '12 at 14:33
  • "whether there's any reason to keep them" If they are all generated by pdflatex, then they can all be re-generated by pdflatex.... – Willie Wong Apr 25 '12 at 14:56
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    We could make this one CW and close the other as a duplicate of this one. – Andrew Stacey Apr 25 '12 at 17:55
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    Duplicate of Prevent pdflatex from writing a bunch of files. or File extensions of LaTeX-related files dependent what the real question is here. – Martin Scharrer Apr 25 '12 at 20:20

1 Answers1

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I started compiling a list of all known auxiliary files on github:

Any help in filling out the document greatly appreciated :)

naught101
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Will Robertson
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