[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX permission denied

bibtextexlivetexworksUbuntu

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 13.10 and had to reinstall TexLive 2013 and TeXWorks. Ordinary typesetting with pdfLaTeX works fine. However, when I try to run BibTeX, the only console output is "Permission denied" and it doesn't compile the bibliography.

I have tried compiling on another machine with the same tex and bib files and it works fine, so I know my source files are fine and the problem must be with how LaTeX is installed.

I thought since the error mentioned permissions, that somehow I had installed it so that only the root user can access BibTex. I tried opening TeXWorks as root (via sudo texworks) and then used that version of TeXWorks to compile, but it couldn't even compile using pdfLaTeX.

How can I change the settings of TeXWorks and/or TeXLive to make BibTeX compile again?

Best Answer

I found the problem. I had two different directories for typesetting saved in the preferences of TeXWorks. One directory was owned by root and the other by my user. Both directories contained a copy of BibTeX and TeXWorks was automatically trying to use the one owned by root, returning the permission error. I removed the directory owned by root from the preferences and it is working again!

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Bibtex not running after upgrading Ubuntu from 13.04 to 13.10

You are using biblatex instead of regular bibtex. That means two things:

You have to specify file extension when you add the *.bib file: \addbibresource{bibliography.bib}.
You have to call biber paper from command line to compile the bibliography.

After that, just compile your paper again and see if it works.

[Tex/LaTex] Latex can’t find .sty files altough packages are installed — TexLive, Ubuntu 12.04

First suggestion would be, Check if the caption.sty file is somewhere on the system

$ locate caption.sty

If it is not installed, most probably the package is not on the basic configuration of texlive.

I used the command

$ apt-cache search caption | grep tex

and found the following packages

texlive-latex-recommended - TeX Live: LaTeX recommended packages
texlive-pictures - TeX Live: Graphics, pictures, diagrams
texlive-latex-extra - TeX Live: LaTeX additional packages
telxcc - Teletext closed captioning decoder

Install them,

$ sudo apt-get -y install texlive-latex-recommended texlive-pictures texlive-latex-extra

and try compiling again!

Friendly advise

If you have hard disk space to spare, I would recommend to install texlive-full, which contains all the packages of the texlive version on the repository. So you have less chance to have this type of problems.

If you install manually

Make sure you add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64-linux
export PATH
MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf/doc/man
export MANPATH
INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf/doc/info
export INFOPATH

Cheers.