Having docstrip place files in different folders

Question

I've written my own biblatex citation style and decided to put both the bbx and the cbx file in a dtx file to process that with docstrip. Now I would like to have docstrip place the files in my local folder ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/biblatex/bbx/ and .../cbx/ respectively. My attempt at using the following ins file failed:

\input docstrip.tex
\askforoverwritefalse
\usedir{~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/biblatex/bbx/}
\generate{\file{blah.bbx}{\from{blah.dtx}{bbx}}}
\usedir{~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/biblatex/cbx/}
\generate{\file{blah.cbx}{\from{blah.dtx}{cbx}}}
\end

It just places both files in the same directory as the dtx file. My guess is that I didn't quite understand the usage of \usedir in the docstrip manual ... Any help would be appreciated!

The ins and dtx file are both in ~/Library/texmf/tex/source/blah/ by the way.

Answer 1

From the docstrip documentation:

\BaseDirectory

This macro is administrator’s way of saying “yes, I want to use that directories support of yours”. DocStrip will write only to current directory unless your config has a call to this macro. (This means DocStrip won’t write to random directories unless you tell it to, which is nice.) Using this macro you can specify a base directory for TEX-related stuff. E.g., for many Unix systems that would be

\BaseDirectory{/usr/local/lib/texmf} 

and for standard emTEX installation

\BaseDirectory{c:/emtex}

You need a more explicit approach:

\input docstrip.tex
\askforoverwritefalse
\catcode`~=11
\BaseDirectory{~}
\DeclareDir{firstLabel}{Library/texmfa/tex/latex/biblatex/bbx/}
\usedir{firstLabel}
\generate{\file{blah.bbx}{\from{blah.dtx}{bbx}}}
\end

Caveats:

1. I couldn't really test this, missing blah.dtx :)

2. The ~ is also messing up your code; remember it means "unbreakable space", so you have to make it a letter (that's what the mysterious catcode is there for).

3. It may not work anyway with ~, try changing that to \BaseDirectory{/home/koji} or whatever your home dir is.

4. Depending on your system, you may have change the variable openout_any in your texmf.cnf. Edit: Since you seem to be using osx, this involves adding

   openout_any = a
   

   in your file

   /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf.cnf