[Tex/LaTex] Deleting external/auxiliary files

auxiliary-filesexternal files

Is there a way to make TeX delete files?

In my document a lot of auxiliary files are created and it would be wonderful to have them removed after their content has been used.

Best Answer

if you want get rid of those files in your document directory then use the optional argument -output-directory=whatever. Then all auxiliary files and the pdf are saved in that directory. For example what I use:

pdflatex -output-directory=target <file>

then my <file>.pdf is also in target, but I always use a softlink ln -s target/<file>.pdf then I have it in my documents directory, too. But as Martin already pointed out, deleting the auxiliary files makes only sense when you are really sure that your pdf file is finished.

If you want to copy the created pdf then use

\usepackage{shellesc}
\AtEndDocument{\ShellEscape{cp /<target>/\jobname.pdf /home/voss/}}

replace /home/voss/ with the directory where the pdf should be copied to. Then run the document with

pdflatex --shell-escape -output-directory=<target> <file>

However, writing a small script seems to be easier.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to clean auxiliary files within subdirectories with latexmk

If all the files in the subdirectories are input using \input, then there'll be no .aux files in the subdirectories. You will only get such .aux files if the running of pdflatex on some other file made them or if you used \include at some point in the past instead of \input. In any case, they are not part of the files involved in the current run of pdflatex, so latexmk correctly does not delete them when you do latexmk -CA. On the other hand, if a file is brought into the document by \include, then the corresponding .aux file is involved in the document, and latexmk -CA will delete it.
If you find some other behavior, we'll need a MWE to understand the problem.
As regards the Makefile, you should look at the section about this in the latexmk documentation. The relevant section "USING latexmk WITH make' is near the end of the documentation, and there are some options to latexmk that are useful. The important thing is that with a little care, make can find all the dependency information that latexmk computes.
If your description of the project is complete, then a Makefile is unnecessary; the command latexmk without any arguments will do what you need, particularly if there is only a single .tex file in your root directory, and any configuration needed is in a latexmkrc file. A Makefile is normally needed only when there are other things you need it to do besides those that latexmk is designed to do.

For your case, a suitable Makefile is

DEPS_DIR = .deps
.PHONY: all clean

# Read in known dependencies:
$(foreach file,$(wildcard $(DEPS_DIR)/*P),$(eval -include $(file)))

all: paper.pdf

%.pdf: %.tex
    @if [ ! -e $(DEPS_DIR) ]; then mkdir $(DEPS_DIR); fi
    latexmk -deps-out=$(DEPS_DIR)/$@P -pdf -dvi- -ps- $<

clean:
    latexmk -C

This uses some special features of GNU make. Dependence information is kept in a subdirectory named .deps.

[Tex/LaTex] Force MikTex to produce auxiliary files

Using @Ulrike_Fischer's suggestion I edited "pdfLaTeX + MakeIndex + BibTeX" in Edit->Preferences->Typesetting and found that --clean was indeed enabled (apparently by default). Deleting this fixed my problem.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to clean auxiliary files within subdirectories with latexmk

[Tex/LaTex] Force MikTex to produce auxiliary files

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