How to avoid automatic .tex extension in filenames?

Question

I am in an mildly unfortunate situation in which, because of the way I prepared the files automatically, I ended up with a file to be attached but also another file with the same name but ending in the .tex extension. It seems that when referring to a file inside TeX the file with the extension .tex is always preferred. For example:

If I have the files example.cpp.tex and example.cpp (no .tex extension), then with

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{attachfile}
\begin{document}
\textattachfile{example.cpp}{link}
\end{document}

attachfile will attach example.cpp.tex instead of example.cpp. This seems to be also true for many LaTeX commands, such as \input, \include, embedfile etc.

How can I enforce to use the file specified and not the .tex terminated one in general or in particular for \attachfile?

(Note: the problem is not the double extension; the unexpected result will also happen with the files example and example.tex.)

Answer 1

There is as far as I know no way to get around the problem.

How TeX handles files with unusual numbers of dots (where "unusual" is any number unequal to 1) is quite inpredictable and also has changed over time. In miktex 2.4 e.g. \input{file.cfg} would have tried at first file.cfg then file.cfg.tex, in miktex 2.5 it tried only file.cfg, in the current 2.9 it tries at first file.cfg.tex and then file.cfg.

The only advice I can give: Avoid in TeX multiple dots like the plague.

Answer 2

If these files are generated automatically, then I recommend some regex-fu to disambiguate the files. Obviously, depending on exactly what the automatic naming scheme for the files is, you may need to change the pattern, but this should be pretty general.

rename 's/\.tex/-tex.tex/' *.tex

What this will do is rename each example.tex file to example-tex.tex. Now doing \input{example} will input example, not example-tex.tex.

OK. So this is a little ugly, but it works. If the files are actually like example.cpp.tex then the less ugly renaming would be:

rename 's/\.cpp\.tex/-cpp.tex/' *.tex

This requires a unix-like terminal or something like cygwin. Hints in comments for a native windows equivalent regex batch file renamer appreciated.