Using the kpathsea library

The kpathsea library provides a very flexible way to specify the search path for files. This library is already used by the web2c distribution of Karl Berry and the teTeX distribution. To achieve compatibility with those TeX systems you can try to make BibTool use the same library.

The kpathsea library is currently NOT CONTAINED in the distribution of BibTool since this is an experimental feature. You can get kpathsea from the same location where you got BibTool. Fetch the file kpse2-6.tar.gz.

Unpack this file. Enter the directory kpse2-6 and use the commands ``./configure'' and ``make'' to create the library. This works at least on Unix platforms. For porting to other platforms I would like to get some feedback.

ATTENTION: The kpathsea library has to exists before BibTool is made!

If you are using configure then the option --with-kpathsea enables the inclusion of the kpathsea routines if the library is found.

To use the library you can just provide three definitions in the makefile. See the section about kpathsea in makefile for explanations. Alternatively you have to provide the appropriate options to the C compiler yourself.

Note: the searching for BibTeX files with the kpathsea library is different from the BibTool built-in searching. Some resources are no longer taken into account when this library is used.

Note: kpathsea is only used to search for BibTeX files. All other files are still searched with the traditional BibTool searching mechanism. This might change soon.

Getting Started with BibTool Using the kpathsea library