How should one use \write18 with BibTeX

Question

Background
Now that TeX Live 2010 has a restricted \write18, I figured it'd be reasonable to update my cv which uses the bibunits package to run BibTeX for each of the .aux files.

Currently, I have a macro \pubs that typesets a label and then the bibliography (\pubs is used inside a cvlist environment from currvita, but that is not important here).

\makeatletter
\newcommand*\pubs[2]{%
        \item[#1]
        \begin{bibunit}%
                \nocite{#2}%
                \putbib
        \end{bibunit}%
        \IfFileExists{\@bibunitname.bbl}{}
                {Run \texttt{bibtex \@bibunitname}}%
}
\makeatother

It is used like \pubs{Refereed papers}{foo,bar,baz} to typeset the bibliography entries corresponding to the citation keys foo, bar, and baz (or it prints a helpful message if BibTeX hasn't been run).

Question
How can I modify this to run bibtex \@bibunitname and then use the results in a sane way?

One idea I had that mostly works is

\makeatletter
\newcommand*\pubs[2]{%
        \item[#1]
        \begin{bibunit}%
                \nocite{#2}%
                \immediate\write\@bibunitaux{\string\bibdata{\bu@bibdata}}%
        \end{bibunit}%
        \immediate\write18{bibtex \@bibunitname}%
        \InputIfFileExists{\@bibunitname.bbl}{}
                {Run \texttt{bibtex \@bibunitname}}%
}
\makeatother

Here the \putbib has been replaced with a write of the \bibdata and \IfFileExists has become \InputIfFileExists. When run, this complains that all of my citations are undefined, but the output looks fine. In particular, all of the aux files are closed before they are read in from the \InputIfFileExists.

Answer 1

After I wrote this answer I realised it's not exactly what you're trying to do. Ohwell Without looking into bibunits, my guess is that you need to wait until after the aux files are closed before you run bibtex. Here's a hack to do it for the main document class:

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\let\end@doc@hook\@enddocumenthook
\def\@enddocumenthook#1\@@end{
  \end@doc@hook
  #1
  \immediate\write18{echo "^^J^^JCompiling bibliography with BibTeX:^^J" && bibtex \jobname && echo "^^JEnd BibTeX processing^^J"}
  \@@end
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\cite{whole-set}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{xampl}
\end{document}

Answer 2

As a big proponent of PerlTeX, I posted a blurb on another post which I am going to shamelessly quote here:

I know this isn't an answer to the question, but perhaps could help you with your problem. PerlTeX allows you to embed Perl code as a LaTeX function. When compiling if you use perltex --nosafe myfile.tex then the perl process has free reign to call system functions. I'm not sure if this could help your problem (because of an order of operations, though if \write18 would work at compile time then this should), but it is a way to get full access to your system as well as other benefits of using inline Perl code in your source.code in your source.