Use texdoc within a shell script (in Alfred.app) doesn’t work

Question

I’m trying to call textoc from OS X Application Alfred as a shell script.

And with Alfred everything seems fine—I already asked the developers but they say that the script should work. When debugging I get the message

21.9.11 17:14:12
[0x0-0x40040].com.alfredapp.Alfred[977]
env: texlua: No such file or directory

therefore I guess it’s a problem with texdoc and not with Alfred. I get the same error if I call texdoc with an apple script

do shell script "texdoc file"

But when calling texdoc file directly in my Terminal or in not-silent mode of Alfred (which means a terminal window opens and the command is executed) everything works. A shell script (td.sh)

#!/bin/bash
texdoc $1

called with sh td.sh file works too.

Hope that anyone has an idea how to solve this or at least point where I can get help …

Answer 1

It's quite strange, with MacTeX, that the default shell, which is called when a shell script is executed via AppleScript, doesn't have /opt/texbin/ in the PATH variable.

It depends on the version of Mac OS X you're running. On Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, there should be a file called TeX in /etc/paths.d/, containing just the line

/usr/texbin

If it's not there, then something has gone wrong with your installation of MacTeX. It's quite easy to correct the behavior: do the following from a terminal window

echo /usr/texbin > TeX
sudo mv TeX /etc/paths.d

and a logoff-login cycle should bring the system into shape. However I don't have a 10.7 machine available, so if your system version is this one, wait for comments.

Check also that a file TeX is present also in /etc/manpaths.d/; if not,

echo /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Man > TeX
sudo mv TeX /etc/manpaths.d

is needed in order to access to the man pages for the TeX programs.

Answer 2

Here you can get the extension

alfred-td.zip

Just unzip and drop to Alfred’s extension window.
Note that it only works with Alfred’s Powerpack (£12).
_{Disclaimer: I’m not associated with the application. I’m just a convinced user, who build an extension.}

With egregs comment I found out Alfred uses not the full path. echo $PATH gives

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

in Alfred but

/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.1/bin:
/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:
/usr/texbin:/usr/local/bin

in Terminal so changed the Alfred script to

#!/bin/bash
PATH="$PATH:/usr/texbin"
/usr/texbin/texdoc {query}

and it works fine now.

Edit
I shortend the code of PATH=.