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Latexmk Man1

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Latexmk Man1

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Elhadji Niang

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LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

NAME
latexmk − generate LaTeX document
SYNOPSIS
latexmk [options] [file ...]
DESCRIPTION
Latexmk completely automates the process of compiling a LaTeX document. Essentially, it is
like a specialized relative of the general make utility, but one which determines dependencies
automatically and has some other very useful features. In its basic mode of operation latexmk is
given the name of the primary source file for a document, and it issues the appropriate sequence
of commands to generate a .dvi, .ps, .pdf and/or hardcopy version of the document.
By default latexmk will run the commands necessary to generate a .dvi file, which copies the
behavior of earlier versions when only latex was available.
Latexmk can also be set to run continuously with a suitable previewer. In that case the latex
program (or one of its relatives), etc, are rerun whenever one of the source files is modified, and
the previewer automatically updates the on-screen view of the compiled document.
Latexmk determines which are the source files by examining the log file. (Optionally, it also
examines the list of input and output files generated by the -recorder option of modern versions
of latex (and pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex). See the documentation for the -recorder option of
latexmk below.) When latexmk is run, it examines properties of the source files, and if any have
been changed since the last document generation, latexmk will run the various LaTeX processing
programs as necessary. In particular, it will repeat the run of latex (or a related program)) often
enough to resolve all cross references; depending on the macro packages used. With some macro
packages and document classes, four, or even more, runs may be needed. If necessary, latexmk
will also run bibtex, biber, and/or makeindex. In addition, latexmk can be configured to generate
other necessary files. For example, from an updated figure file it can automatically generate a file
in encapsulated postscript or another suitable format for reading by LaTeX.
Latexmk has two different previewing options. With the simple -pv option, a dvi, postscript or
pdf previewer is automatically run after generating the dvi, postscript or pdf version of the
document. The type of file to view is selected according to configuration settings and command
line options.
The second previewing option is the powerful -pvc option (mnemonic: "preview continuously").
In this case, latexmk runs continuously, regularly monitoring all the source files to see if any have
changed. Every time a change is detected, latexmk runs all the programs necessary to generate a
new version of the document. A good previewer will then automatically update its display. Thus
the user can simply edit a file and, when the changes are written to disk, latexmk completely
automates the cycle of updating the .dvi (and/or the .ps and .pdf) file, and refreshing the
previewer’s display. It’s not quite WYSIWYG, but usefully close.
For other previewers, the user may have to manually make the previewer update its display,
which can be (e.g., with some versions of xdvi and gsview) as simple as forcing a redraw of its
display.
Latexmk has the ability to print a banner in gray diagonally across each page when making the
postscript file. It can also, if needed, call an external program to do other postprocessing on
generated dvi and postscript files. (See the options -dF and -pF, and the documentation for the
$dvi_filter and $ps_filter configuration variables.) These capabilities are leftover from older
versions of latexmk, but are currently non-functional. More flexibility can be obtained in

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current versions, since the command strings for running *latex can now be configured to run
multiple commands. This also extends the possibility of postprocessing generated files.
Latexmk is highly configurable, both from the command line and in configuration files, so that it
can accommodate a wide variety of user needs and system configurations. Default values are set
according to the operating system, so latexmk often works without special configuration on MS-
Windows, cygwin, Linux, OS-X, and other UNIX systems. See the section
"Configuration/Initialization (rc) Files", and then the later sections "How to Set Variables in
Initialization Files", "Format of Command Specifications", "List of Configuration Variables
Usable in Initialization Files", "Custom Dependencies", and "Advanced Configuration"
A very annoying complication handled very reliably by latexmk, is that LaTeX is a multiple pass
system. On each run, LaTeX reads in information generated on a previous run, for things like
cross referencing and indexing. In the simplest cases, a second run of LaTeX suffices, and often
the log file contains a message about the need for another pass. However, there is a wide variety
of add-on macro packages to LaTeX, with a variety of behaviors. The result is to break simple-
minded determinations of how many runs are needed and of which programs. Latexmk has a
highly general and efficient solution to these issues. The solution involves retaining between runs
information on the source files, and a symptom is that latexmk generates an extra file (with
extension .fdb_latexmk, by default) that contains the source file information.

LATEXMK OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS ON COMMAND LINE

In general the command line to invoke latexmk has the form

latexmk [options] [ﬁle]

All options can be introduced by single or double "-" characters, e.g., "latexmk -help" or
"latexmk --help".

Note 1: In the documentation, ’*latex’ means any of the supported engines, i.e., currently latex,
lualatex, pdflatex, xelatex. Mention of a specific one of these normally refers that specific
engines. Earlier versions of this documentation weren’t so consistent. Which of these is used to
compile a document, depends on the configuration and the command line arguments.

Note 2: In addition to the options in the list below, latexmk recognizes almost all the options
recognized by the *latex programs in their current TeXLive and MiKTeX implementations.
Some of the options for these programs trigger special action or behavior by latexmk, in which
case they have speciﬁc explanations in this document; in this case they may or may not be passed
to *latex as well.

Run latexmk with the -showextraoptions to get a list of the options that latexmk accepts and that
are simply passed through to *latex. See also the explanation of the -showextraoptions option
for more information.

Deﬁnitions of options and arguments

file One or more files can be specified. If no files are specified, latexmk will, by default, run
on all files in the current working directory with a ".tex" extension. This behavior can

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be changed: see the description concerning the @default_files variable in the section
"List of configuration variables usable in initialization files".

If a ﬁle is speciﬁed without an extension, then the ".tex" extension is automatically

added, just as LaTeX does. Thus, if you specify:

latexmk foo

then latexmk will operate on the ﬁle "foo.tex".

There are certain restrictions on what characters can be in a filename; certain characters
are either prohibited or problematic for the latex etc programs. These characters are:
"$", "%", "\", "˜", the double quote character, and the control characters null, tab, form
feed, carriage return, line feed, and delete. In addition "&" is prohibited when it is the
first character of a filename.

Latexmk gives a fatal error when it detects any of the above characters in the TeX
filename(s) specified on the command line. However before testing for illegal
characters, latexmk removes matching pairs of double quotes from a filename. This
matches the behavior of latex etc, and deals with problems that occasionally result from
filenames that have been incorrectly quoted on the command line. In addition, under
Microsoft Windows, the forward slash character "\" is a directory separator, so latexmk
replaces it by a forward slash "/", which is also a legal directory separator in Windows,
and is accepted by latex etc.

-auxdir=FOO or -aux-directory=FOO
Sets the directory for auxiliary output files of *latex (.aux, .log etc). These are all the
generated files, with the exception of final output files (.dvi, .ps, .pdf, .synctex.gz,
.synctex). See the -outdir/-output-directory option for directories for the main output
files, and the -out2dir option for the final output files.

If the directory speciﬁed for the -aux/-aux-directory option is blank, then the default is
used, which is to be the same as the output directory.

If you also use the -cd option, and the speciﬁed auxiliary output directory is a relative
path, then the path is interpreted relative to the document directory.

See the section AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES for more details.

-bibtex When the source file uses bbl files for bibliography, run bibtex or biber as needed to
regenerate the bbl files.

This property can also be conﬁgured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 2 in a

conﬁguration ﬁle.

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-bibtex-
Never run bibtex or biber. Also, always treat .bbl ﬁles as precious, i.e., do not delete
them in a cleanup operation.

A common use for this option is when a document comes from an external source,
complete with its bbl file(s), and the user does not have the corresponding bib files
available. In this situation use of the -bibtex- option will prevent latexmk from trying to
run bibtex or biber, which would result in overwriting of the bbl files.

This property can also be conﬁgured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 0 in a

conﬁguration ﬁle.

-bibtex-cond
When the source file uses a bbl file for the bibliography and bibtex is used to generate
the bibliography, run bibtex as needed to regenerate the bbl files only if the relevant bib
file(s) exist. Thus when the bib file(s) are not available, bibtex is not run, thereby
avoiding overwriting of the bbl file. Also, always treat .bbl files as precious, i.e., do not
delete them in a cleanup operation.

This is the default setting. It can also be configured by setting the $bibtex_use variable
to 1 in a configuration file.

The reason for using this setting is first to allow automatic switching between the use
and non-use of bibtex depending on the existence or not of a bib file. In addition, when
submitting articles to a scientific journal, it is common to submit only .tex and .bbl files
(plus graphics files), but not a .bib file. Hence it is often useful to treat .bbl files as true
source files, that should be preserved under a clean up operation.

This property can also be conﬁgured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 1 in a

conﬁguration ﬁle.

Note that when biber is used, and a bib file doesn’t exist, this option does not prevent
biber from being run, with the bbl file then being incorrect. See the documentation on
$bibtex_use for more details. However, a bbl file is treated as precious in a clean up
operation.

-bibtex-cond1
The same as -bibtex-cond except that .bbl ﬁles are only treated as precious if one or
more bibﬁles fails to exist.

Thus if all the bib files exist, bibtex is run to generate .bbl files as needed, and then it is
appropriate to delete the bbl files in a cleanup operation since they can be re-generated.

This property can also be configured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 1.5 in a
configuration file.

Note that when biber is used, and a bib ﬁle doesn’t exist, this option does not prevent

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biber from being run, with the bbl ﬁle then being incorrect. See the documentation on
$bibtex_use for more details. However, a bbl ﬁle is treated as precious in a clean up
operation.

-bibtexfudge or -bibfudge
Turn on the change-directory fudge for bibtex. See documentation of $bibtex_fudge for
details.

-bibtexfudge- or -bibfudge-
Turn off the change-directory fudge for bibtex. See documentation of $bibtex_fudge for
details.

-bm <message>
A banner message to print diagonally across each page when converting the dvi ﬁle to
postscript. The message must be a single argument on the command line so be careful
with quoting spaces and such.

Note that if the -bm option is speciﬁed, the -ps option is assumed.

-bi <intensity>
How dark to print the banner message. A decimal number between 0 and 1. 0 is black
and 1 is white. The default is 0.95, which is OK unless your toner cartridge is getting
low.

-bs <scale>
A decimal number that speciﬁes how large the banner message will be printed.
Experimentation is necessary to get the right scale for your message, as a rule of thumb
the scale should be about equal to 1100 divided by the number of characters in the
message. The default is 220.0 which is just right for 5 character messages.

-commands
List the commands used by latexmk for processing ﬁles, and then exit.

-c Clean up (remove) all regeneratable files generated by latex and bibtex or biber except
dvi, postscript and pdf. These files are a combination of log files, aux files, latexmk’s
database file of source file information, and those with extensions specified in the
@generated_exts configuration variable. In addition, files specified by the $clean_ext
and @generated_exts configuration variables are removed.

This cleanup is instead of a regular make. See the -gg option if you want to do a
cleanup followed by a make.

Treatment of .bbl files: If $bibtex_use is set to 0 or 1, bbl files are always treated as non-
regeneratable. If $bibtex_use is set to 1.5, bbl files are counted as non-regeneratable
conditionally: If the bib file exists, then bbl files are regeneratable, and are deleted in a

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clean up. But if $bibtex_use is 1.5 and a bib ﬁle doesn’t exist, then the bbl ﬁles are
treated as non-regeneratable and hence are not deleted.

In contrast, if $bibtex_use is set to 2, bbl ﬁles are always treated as regeneratable, and
are deleted in a cleanup.

Treatment of ﬁles generated by custom dependencies: If

$cleanup_includes_cusdep_generated is nonzero, regeneratable ﬁles are considered as
including those generated by custom dependencies and are also deleted. Otherwise
these ﬁles are not deleted.

-C Clean up (remove) all regeneratable files generated by latex and bibtex or biber. This is
the same as the -c option with the addition of dvi, postscript and pdf files, and those
specified in the $clean_full_ext configuration variable.

This cleanup is instead of a regular make. See the -gg option if you want to do a
cleanup followed by a make.

See the -c option for the speciﬁcation of whether or not .bbl ﬁles are treated as non-
regeneratable or regeneratable.

If $cleanup_includes_cusdep_generated is nonzero, regeneratable ﬁles are considered as

including those generated by custom dependencies and are also deleted. Otherwise
these ﬁles are not deleted.

-CA (Obsolete). Now equivalent to the -C option. See that option for details.

-cd Change to the directory containing the main source file before processing it. Then all
the generated files (.aux, .log, .dvi, .pdf, etc) will be relative to the source file.

This option is particularly useful when latexmk is invoked from a GUI conﬁgured to
invoke latexmk with a full pathname for the source ﬁle.

This option works by setting the $do_cd conﬁguration variable to one; you can set that
variable if you want to conﬁgure latexmk to have the effect of the -cd option without
specifying it on the command line. See the documentation for that variable.

-cd- Do NOT change to the directory containing the main source file before processing it.
Then all the generated files (.aux, .log, .dvi, .pdf, etc) will be relative to the current
directory rather than the source file.

This is the default behavior and corresponds to the behavior of the *latex programs.
However, it is not desirable behavior when latexmk is invoked by a GUI conﬁgured to
invoke latexmk with a full pathname for the source ﬁle. See the -cd option.

This option works by setting the $do_cd conﬁguration variable to zero. See the
documentation for that variable for more information.

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-CF Remove the ﬁle containing the database of source ﬁle information, before doing the
other actions requested.

-d Set draft mode. This prints the banner message "DRAFT" across your page when
converting the dvi ﬁle to postscript. Size and intensity can be modiﬁed with the -bs and
-bi options. The -bm option will override this option as this is really just a short way of
specifying:

latexmk -bm DRAFT

Note that if the -d option is speciﬁed, the -ps option is assumed.

-deps Show a list of dependent files after processing. This is in the form of a dependency list
of the form used by the make program, and it is therefore suitable for use in a Makefile.
It gives an overall view of the files without listing intermediate files, as well as latexmk
can determine them.

By default the list of dependent ﬁles is sent to stdout (i.e., normally to the screen unless
you’ve redirected latexmk’s output). But you can set the ﬁlename where the list is sent
by the -deps-out= option.

See the section "USING latexmk WITH make" for an example of how to use a
dependency list with make.

Users familiar with GNU automake and gcc will ﬁnd that the -deps option is very
similar in its purpose and results to the -M option to gcc. (In fact, latexmk also has
options -M, -MF, and -MP options that behave like those of gcc.)

-dependents
Equivalent to -deps.

-deps- Do not show a list of dependent ﬁles after processing. (This is the default.)

-dependents-
Equivalent to -deps-.

-deps-escape=<string>
Set the kind of escaping used for spaces in the dependency list. The possible values are
"none", "unix", "nmake", corresponding respectively to no escaping, escaping with a "\"
suitable for standard Unix make, and escaping with "ˆ", suitable for Microsoft’s nmake.

-deps-out=FILENAME
Set the ﬁlename to which the list of dependent ﬁles is written. If the FILENAME
argument is omitted or set to "-", then the output is sent to stdout.

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Use of this option also turns on the output of the list of dependent ﬁles after processing.

-dF Dvi file filtering. The argument to this option is a filter which will generate a filtered dvi
file with the extension ".dviF". All extra processing (e.g. conversion to postscript,
preview, printing) will then be performed on this filtered dvi file.

Example usage: To use dviselect to select only the even pages of the dvi ﬁle:

latexmk -dF "dviselect even" foo.tex

-diagnostics
Print detailed diagnostics during a run. This may help for debugging problems or to
understand latexmk’s behavior in difﬁcult situations.

-dir-report
For each .tex ﬁle processed, list the settings for aux and out directories, after they have
been normalized from the settings speciﬁed during initialization. See the description of
the variable $aux_out_dir_report for more details.

-dir-report-
Do not report the settings for aux and out directories. (Default)

-dir-report-only
After all initialization is complete, give the settings for the aux and out directories, and
then halt. This option is primarily used for debugging conﬁguration issues.

-dvi Generate dvi version of document using latex. (And turn off any incompatible requests.)

-dvilua Generate dvi version of document using lualatex instead of latex. (And turn off any
incompatible requests.)

-dvi- Turn off generation of dvi version of document. (This may get overridden, if some other
file is made (e.g., a .ps file) that is generated from the dvi file, or if no generated file at
all is requested.)

-dvilualatex="COMMAND"
This sets the string specifying the command to run dvi lualatex. It behaves like the
-pdﬂatex option, but sets the variable $dvilualatex.

Note: This option when provided with the COMMAND argument only sets the command
for invoking dvilualatex; it does not turn on the use of dvilualatex. That is done by other
options or in an initialization ﬁle.

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-e <code>
Execute the specified initialization code before processing. The code is Perl code of the
same form as is used in latexmk’s initialization files. For more details, see the
information on the -r option, and the section about "Configuration/initialization (RC)
files". The code is typically a sequence of assignment statements separated by
semicolons.

The code is executed when the -e option is encountered during latexmk’s parsing of its
command line. See the -r option for a way of executing initialization code from a ﬁle.
An error results in latexmk stopping. Multiple instances of the -r and -e options can be
used, and they are executed in the order they appear on the command line.

Some care is needed to deal with proper quoting of special characters in the code on the
command line. For example, suppose you want to set the latex command to use its
-shell-escape option, then under UNIX/Linux you could use the line

latexmk -e ’$latex=q/latex %O -shell-escape %S/’ ﬁle.tex

Note that the single quotes block normal UNIX/Linux command shells from treating the
characters inside the quotes as special. (In this example, the q/.../ construct is a Perl
idiom equivalent to using single quotes. This avoids the complications of getting a
quote character inside an already quoted string in a way that is independent of both the
shell and the operating-system.)

The above command line will NOT work under MS-Windows with cmd.exe or
command.com or 4nt.exe. For MS-Windows with these command shells you could use

latexmk -e "$latex=q/latex %O -shell-escape %S/" ﬁle.tex

latexmk -e "$latex=’latex %O -shell-escape %S’" ﬁle.tex

The last two examples will NOT work with UNIX/Linux command shells.

(Note: the above examples show are to show how to use the -e to specify initialization
code to be executed. But the particular effect can be achieved also by the use of the
-latex option with less problems in dealing with quoting.)

-emulate-aux-dir
Emulate the use of an aux directory instead of leaving it to the *latex programs to do it.
(MiKTeX supports -aux-directory, but TeXLive doesn’t.)

See the section AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES for more details.

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-emulate-aux-dir-
Turn off emulation to implement an aux directory and leave it to the *latex program to
handle the case that the aux directory is different from the output directory. Note that if
you use TeXLive, which doesn’t support -aux-directory, latexmk will automatically
switch aux_dir emulation on after the first run of *latex, because it will find the .log file
in the wrong place.

-f Force latexmk to continue document processing despite errors. Normally, when latexmk
detects that LaTeX or another program has found an error which will not be resolved by
further processing, no further processing is carried out.

Note: "Further processing" means the running of other programs or the rerunning of
latex (etc) that would be done if no errors had occurred. If instead, or additionally, you
want the latex (etc) program not to pause for user input after an error, you should
arrange this by an option that is passed to the program, e.g., by latexmk’s option
-interaction=nonstopmode (which latexmk passes to *latex).

-f- Turn off the forced processing-past-errors such as is set by the -f option. This could be
used to override a setting in a conﬁguration ﬁle.

-g Force latexmk to process document fully, even under situations where latexmk would
normally decide that no changes in the source ﬁles have occurred since the previous run.
This option is useful, for example, if you change some options and wish to reprocess the
ﬁles.

-g- Turn off -g.

-gg "Super go mode" or "clean make": clean out generated ﬁles as if -C had been given, and
then do a regular make.

-h or-non-help
Print help information.

-hnt Generate hnt (HINT) version of document using hilatex. (And turn off any incompatible
requests.)

-jobname=STRING
Set the basename of output files(s) to STRING, instead of the default, which is the
basename of the specified TeX file. (At present, STRING should not contain spaces.)

This is like the same option for current implementations of the *latex, and the passing of
this option to these programs is part of latexmk’s implementation of -jobname.

There is one enhancement, that the STRING may contain the placeholder ’%A’. This
will be substituted by the basename of the TeX ﬁle. The primary purpose is when

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multiple files are specified on the command line to latexmk, and you wish to use a
jobname with a different file-dependent value for each file. For example, suppose you
had .tex files test1.tex and test2.tex, and you wished to compare the results of
compilation by *latex and those with xelatex. Then under a unix-type operating system
you could use the command line

latexmk -pdf -jobname=%A-pdﬂatex *.tex

latexmk -pdfxe -jobname=%A-xelatex *.tex

Then the .aux, .log, and .pdf files from the use of pdflatex would have basenames
test1-pdflatex and test2-pdflatex, while from xelatex, the basenames would be
test1-xelatex and test2-xelatex.

Under MS-Windows with cmd.exe, you would need to double the percent sign, so that
the percent character is passed to latexmk rather than being used to substitute an
environment variable:

latexmk -pdf -jobname=%%A-pdﬂatex *.tex

latexmk -pdfxe -jobname=%%A-xelatex *.tex

-l Run in landscape mode, using the landscape mode for the previewers and the dvi to
postscript converters. This option is not normally needed nowadays, since current
previewers normally determine this information automatically.

-l- Turn off -l.

-latex This sets the generation of dvi ﬁles by latex, and turns off the generation of pdf and ps
ﬁles.

Note: to set the command used when latex is speciﬁed, see the -latex="COMMAND"
option.

-latex="COMMAND"
This sets the string specifying the command to run latex, and is typically used to add
desired options. Since the string normally contains spaces, it should be quoted, e.g.,

latexmk -latex="latex --shell-escape %O %S" foo.tex

The speciﬁcation of the contents of the string are the same as for the $latex
conﬁguration variable. Depending on your operating system and the command-line
shell you are using, you may need to change the single quotes to double quotes (or
something else).

Note: This option when provided with the COMMAND argument only sets the command
for invoking latex; it does not turn on the use of latex. That is done by other options or in
an initialization ﬁle.

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To set the command for running pdﬂatex (rather than the command for latex) see the
-pdﬂatex option.

-logfilewarninglist
-logfilewarnings After a run of *latex, give a list of warnings about undefined citations
and references (unless silent mode is on).

This option is equivalent to using the following set of options

-pdﬂua -dvi- -ps-

(Note: Note that the method of implementation of this option, but not its intended effect,
differ from some earlier versions of latexmk.)

-lualatex="COMMAND"
This sets the string specifying the command to run lualatex. It behaves like the
-pdﬂatex option, but sets the variable $lualatex.

Note: This option when provided with the COMMAND argument only sets the command
for invoking lualatex; it does not turn on the use of lualatex. That is done by other
options or in an initialization ﬁle.

-M Show list of dependent ﬁles after processing. This is equivalent to the -deps option.

-MF file
If a list of dependents is made, the -MF specifies the file to write it to.

-MP If a list of dependents is made, include a phony target for each source file. If you use the
dependents list in a Makefile, the dummy rules work around errors the program make
gives if you remove header files without updating the Makefile to match.

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-makeindexfudge
Turn on the change-directory fudge for makeindex. See documentation of
$makeindex_fudge for details.

-makeindexfudge-
Turn off the change-directory fudge for makeindex. See documentation of
$makeindex_fudge for details.

$min_sleep_time [0.01]
This is the minimum nonzero value allowed for $sleep_time.

-MSWinBackSlash
This option only has an effect when latexmk is running under MS-Windows. This is that
when latexmk runs a command under MS-Windows, the Windows standard directory
separator "\" is used to separate directory components in a ﬁle name. Internally, latexmk
uses "/" for the directory separator character, which is the character used by Unix-like
systems.

This is the default behavior. However the default may have been overridden by a
configuration file (latexmkrc file) which sets $MSWin_back_slash=0.

-MSWinBackSlash-
This option only has an effect when latexmk is running under MS-Windows. This is that
when latexmk runs a command under MS-Windows, the substitution of "\" for the
separator character between directory components of a ﬁle name is not done. Instead the
forward slash "/" is used, the same as on Unix-like systems. This is acceptable in most
situations under MS-Windows, provided that ﬁlenames are properly quoted, as latexmk
does by default.

See the documentation for the conﬁguration variable $MSWin_back_slash for more
details.

-new-viewer
When in continuous-preview mode, always start a new viewer to view the generated file.
By default, latexmk will, in continuous-preview mode, test for a previously running
previewer for the same file and not start a new one if a previous previewer is running.
However, its test sometimes fails (notably if there is an already-running previewer that is
viewing a file of the same name as the current file, but in a different directory). This
option turns off the default behavior.

-new-viewer-
The inverse of the -new-viewer option. It puts latexmk in its normal behavior that in
preview-continuous mode it checks for an already-running previewer.

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-nobibtex
Never run bibtex or biber. Equivalent to the -bibtex- option.

-nobibtexfudge or -nobibfudge
Turn off the change-directory fudge for bibtex. See documentation of $bibtex_fudge for
details.

-noemulate-aux-dir
Turn aux_dir emulation off. Same as -emulate-aux-dir-.

-nomakeindexfudge
Turn off the change-directory fudge for makeindex. See documentation of
$makeindex_fudge for details.

-norc Turn off the automatic reading of initialization (rc) ﬁles.

N.B. Normally the initialization ﬁles are read and obeyed, and then command line
options are obeyed in the order they are encountered. But -norc is an exception to this
rule: it is acted on ﬁrst, no matter where it occurs on the command line.

-outdir=FOO or -output-directory=FOO

Sets the directory for the output ﬁles of *latex.

If the aux directory is not set or is the same as the output directory, then all output ﬁles
of *latex are sent to the output directory.

If the aux directory is set, e.g., by the option -auxdir, and is not equal to the output
directory, then only the primary output ﬁles (.dvi, .ps, .pdf, .synctex, .synctex.gz) are
sent to the output directory. Other generated ﬁles are sent to the aux directory.

See the section AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES for more details.

-out2dir=FOO

(Experimental new feature.)

Sets the directory for the ﬁnal output ﬁles of a whole round of compilations.

The use of this directory solves, among other things, the problem that when multiple
runs of *latex and other programs are needed, files like the main pdf file from pdflatex,
etc will be changed multiple times. A viewer like SumatraPDF that reloads the file
whenever it detects changes will show a distracting sequence of intermediate states of
the pdf file, rather than just the final version after all the repeated runs of *latex etc have
been done. Instead, when a distinct final-output directory is set, by the -out2dir option
or the equivalent $out2_dir variable is set, the viewer will only see a changed pdf (etc)

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ﬁle after full sequence of repeated runs of *latex etc has ﬁnished.

By default the final output directory is the same as the output directory (as specified by
the -outdir option or the setting of the variable $out_dir configuration variable).

-output-format=FORMAT
This option is one that is allowed for latex, lualatex, and pdﬂatex. But it is not passed to
these programs. Instead latexmk emulates it in a way suitable for the context of latexmk
and its workﬂows.

-If FORMAT is dvi, then dvi output is turned on, and postscript, pdf and xdv output are
turned off. This is equivalent to using the options -dvi -ps- -pdf- -xdv-.

If FORMAT is pdf, then pdf output is turned on, and dvi, postscript and xdv output are
turned off. This is equivalent to using the options -pdf -ps- -dvi- -xdv-.

If FORMAT is anything else, latexmk gives an error.

-p Print out the document. By default the file to be printed is the first in the list postscript,
pdf, dvi that is being made. But you can use the -print=... option to change the type of
file to be printed, and you can configure this in a start up file (by setting the $print_type
variable).

However, printing is enabled by default only under UNIX/Linux systems, where the
default is to use the lpr command and only on postscript files. In general, the correct
behavior for printing very much depends on your system’s software. In particular, under
MS-Windows you must have suitable program(s) available, and you must have
configured the print commands used by latexmk. This can be non-trivial. See the
documentation on the $lpr, $lpr_dvi, and $lpr_pdf configuration variables to see how to
set the commands for printing.

This option is incompatible with the -pv and -pvc options, so it turns them off.

-pdf Generate pdf version of document using pdﬂatex. (And turn off any incompatible
requests.)

(If you wish to use lualatex or xelatex, you can use whichever of the options -pdflua,
-pdfxe, -lualatex or -xelatex applies.) To configure latexmk to have such behavior by
default, see the section on "Configuration/initialization (rc) files".

-pdfdvi
Generate dvi ﬁle and then pdf version of document from the dvi ﬁle, by default using
dvipdf. (And turn off any incompatible requests.)

The program used to compile the document to dvi is latex by default, but this can be
changed to dvilulatex by the use of the -dvilua option or by setting $dvi_mode to 2.

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-pdﬂua Generate pdf version of document using lualatex. (And turn off any incompatible
requests.)

-pdfps Generate dvi file, ps file from the dvi file, and then pdf file from the ps file. (And turn
off any incompatible requests.)

The program used to compile the document to dvi is latex by default, but this can be
changed to dvilulatex by the use of the -dvilua option or by setting $dvi_mode to 2.

-pdfxe Generate pdf version of document using xelatex. (And turn off any incompatible
requests.)

Note that to optimize processing time, latexmk uses xelatex to generate an .xdv file
rather than a pdf file directly. Only after possibly multiple runs to generate a fully up-to-
date .xdv file does latexmk then call xdvipdfmx to generate the final .pdf file.

(Note: The reason why latexmk arranges for xelatex to make an .xdv file instead of the
xelatex’s default of a .pdf file is as follows: When the document includes large graphics
files, especially .png files, the production of a .pdf file can be quite time consuming,
even when the creation of the .xdv file by xelatex is fast. So the use of the intermediate
.xdv file can result in substantial gains in procesing time, since the .pdf file is produced
once rather than on every run of xelatex.)

-pdf- Turn off generation of pdf version of document. (This can be used to override a setting
in a configuration file. It may get overridden if some other option requires the
generation of a pdf file.)

If after all options have been processed, pdf generation is still turned off, then generation
of a dvi file will be turned on, and then the program used to compiled a document will
be latex (or, more precisely, whatever program is configured to be used in the $latex
configuration variable).

-pdflatex
Set the generation of pdf files by pdflatex. (And turn off any incompatible requests.)

Note: to set the command used when pdflatex is specified, see the
-pdflatex="COMMAND" option.

-pdﬂatex="COMMAND"
This sets the string specifying the command to run pdﬂatex, and is typically used to add
desired options. Since the string normally contains spaces, it should be quoted, e.g.,

latexmk -pdf -pdﬂatex="pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S" foo.tex

The specification of the contents of the string are the same as for the $pdflatex
configuration variable. (The option -pdflatex in fact sets the variable $pdflatex.)

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Depending on your operating system and the command-line shell you are using, you
may need to change the single quotes to double quotes (or something else).

Note: This option when provided with the COMMAND argument only sets the command
for invoking pdflatex; it does not turn on the use of pdflatex. That is done by other
options or in an initialization file.

To set the command for running latex (rather than the command for pdﬂatex) see the
-latex option.

-pdﬂualatex="COMMAND"
Equivalent to -lualatex="COMMAND".

-pdfxelatex="COMMAND"
Equivalent to -xelatex="COMMAND".

-pretex=CODE

Given that CODE is some TeX code, this options sets that code to be executed before
inputting source ﬁle. This only works if the command for invoking the relevant *latex is
suitably conﬁgured. See the documentation of the variable $pre_tex_code, and the
substitution strings %P and %U for more details. This option works by setting the
variable $pre_tex_code.

latexmk -pretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ -usepretex foo.tex

But this is better written

latexmk -usepretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ foo.tex

If you already have a suitable command conﬁgured, you only need

latexmk -pretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ foo.tex

-print=dvi, -print=ps, -print=pdf, -print=auto,

Define which kind of file is printed. This option also ensures that the requisite file is
made, and turns on printing.

The (default) case -print=auto determines the kind of print file automatically from the
set of files that is being made. The first in the list postscript, pdf, dvi that is among the
files to be made is the one used for print out.

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-ps Generate postscript version of document. (And turn off any incompatible requests.)

-ps- Turn off generation of postscript version of document. This can be used to override a
setting in a configuration file. (It may get overridden by some other option that requires
a postscript file, for example a request for printing.)

-pF Postscript file filtering. The argument to this option is a filter which will generate a
filtered postscript file with the extension ".psF". All extra processing (e.g. preview,
printing) will then be performed on this filtered postscript file.

Example of usage: Use psnup to print two pages on the one page:

latexmk -ps -pF ’psnup -2’ foo.tex

latexmk -ps -pF "psnup -2" foo.tex

Whether to use single or double quotes round the "psnup -2" will depend on your
command interpreter, as used by the particular version of perl and the operating system
on your computer.

-pv Run file previewer. If the -view option is used, that will select the kind of file to be
previewed (.pdf, .ps or .dvi). Otherwise the viewer views the "highest" kind of output
file that is made, with the ordering being .pdf, .ps, .dvi (high to low). This option is
incompatible with the -p and -pvc options, so it turns them off.

-pv- Turn off -pv.

-pvc Run a file previewer and continually update the .dvi, .ps, and/or .pdf files whenever
changes are made to source files (see the Description above). Which of these files is
generated and which is viewed is governed by the other options, and is the same as for
the -pv option. The preview-continuous option -pvc can only work with one file. So in
this case you will normally only specify one filename on the command line. It is also
incompatible with the -p and -pv options, so it turns these options off.

The -pvc option also turns off force mode (-f), as is normally best for continuous
preview mode. If you really want force mode, use the options in the order -pvc -f.

With a good previewer the display will be automatically updated. (Under some but not
all versions of UNIX/Linux "gv -watch" does this for postscript files; this can be set by a
configuration variable. This would also work for pdf files except for an apparent bug in
gv that causes an error when the newly updated pdf file is read.) Many other previewers
will need a manual update.

Important note: the acroread program on MS-Windows locks the pdf ﬁle, and prevents

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new versions being written, so it is a bad idea to use acroread to view pdf ﬁles in
preview-continuous mode. It is better to use a different viewer: SumatraPDF and
gsview are good possibilities.

There are some other methods for arranging an update, notably useful for many versions
of xdvi and xpdf. These are best set in latexmk’s conﬁguration; see below.

Note that if latexmk dies or is stopped by the user, the "forked" previewer will continue
to run. Successive invocations with the -pvc option will not fork new previewers, but
latexmk will normally use the existing previewer. (At least this will happen when
latexmk is running under an operating system where it knows how to determine whether
an existing previewer is running.)

-pvc- Turn off -pvc.

-pvctimeout
Do timeout in pvc mode after period of inactivity, which is 30 min. by default.
Inactivity means a period when latexmk has detected no ﬁle changes and hence has not
taken any actions like compiling the document.

-pvctimeout-
Don’t do timeout in pvc mode after inactivity.

-pvctimeoutmins=<time>
Set period of inactivity in minutes for pvc timeout.

-quiet Same as -silent

-r <rcfile>
Read the specified initialization file ("RC file") before processing.

Be careful about the ordering: (1) Standard initialization files -- see the section below on
"Configuration/initialization (RC) files" -- are read first. (2) Then the options on the
command line are acted on in the order they are given. Therefore if an initialization file
is specified by the -r option, it is read during this second step. Thus an initialization file
specified with the -r option can override both the standard initialization files and
previously specified options. But all of these can be overridden by later options.

The contents of the RC ﬁle just comprise a piece of code in the Perl programming
language (typically a sequence of assignment statements); they are executed when the -r
option is encountered during latexmk’s parsing of its command line. See the -e option
for a way of giving initialization code directly on latexmk’s command line. An error
results in latexmk stopping. Multiple instances of the -r and -e options can be used, and
they are executed in the order they appear on the command line.

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-rc-report
After initialization, give a list of the RC ﬁles read. (Default)

-rc-report-
After initialization, do not give a list of the RC ﬁles read.

-recorder
Give the -recorder option with *latex. In (most) modern versions of these programs, this
results in a file of extension .fls containing a list of the files that these programs have
read and written. Latexmk will then use this file to improve its detection of source files
and generated files after a run of *latex. This is the default setting of latexmk, unless
overridden in an initialization file.

For further information, see the documentation for the $recorder conﬁguration variable.

-recorder-
Do not supply the -recorder option with *latex.

-rules Show a list of latemk’s rules and dependencies after processing.

-rules- Do not show a list of latexmk’s rules and dependencies after processing. (This is the
default.)

-showextraoptions
Show the list of extra *latex options that latexmk recognizes, but that it simply passes
through to the programs *latex when they are run. These options are (currently) a
combination of those allowed by the TeXLive and MiKTeX implementations. (If a
particular option is given to latexmk but is not handled by the particular implementation
of *latex that is being used, that program will probably give a warning or an error.)
These options are very numerous, but are not listed in this documentation because they
have no effect on latexmk’s actions.

There are a few options (e.g., -includedirectory=dir, -initialize, -ini) that are not
recognized, either because they don’t ﬁt with latexmk’s intended operations, or because
they need special processing by latexmk that isn’t implemented (at least, not yet).

There are certain options for *latex (e.g., -recorder) that trigger special actions or
behavior by latexmk itself. Depending on the action, they may also be passed in some
form to the called *latex program, and/or may affect other programs as well. These
options do have entries in this documentation. Among these options are:
-jobname=STRING, -aux-directory=dir, -output-directory=DIR, -quiet, and
-recorder.

There are also options that are accepted by *latex, but instead trigger actions purely by
latexmk: -help, -version.

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-silent Run commands silently, i.e., with options that reduce the amount of diagnostics
generated. For example, with the default settings, the command "latex
-interaction=batchmode" is used for latex, and similarly for its friends.

Note that the ﬁlename may be speciﬁed without an extension, e.g., by

\includegraphics{drawing} in a LaTeX ﬁle. In that case, latexmk will try making
drawing.ext with ext set in turn to the possible extensions that are relevant for latex (or
as appropriate pdﬂatex, lualatex, xelatex).

latexmk -usepretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ foo.tex

-v or -version
Print version number of latexmk.

-verbose
Opposite of -silent. This is the default setting.

-view=default, -view=dvi, -view=hnt, -view=ps, -view=pdf, -view=none

Set the kind of ﬁle used when previewing is requested (e.g., by the -pv or -pvc
switches). The default is to view the "highest" kind of requested ﬁle (in the low-to-high
order .dvi, .hnt, .ps, .pdf).

Note the possibility -view=none where no viewer is opened at all. One example of is
use is in conjunction with the -pvc option, when you want latexmk to do a compilation
automatically whenever source ﬁle(s) change, but do not want a previewer to be opened.

-Werror
This causes latexmk to return a non-zero status code if any of the files processed gives a
warning about problems with citations or references (i.e., undefined citations or
references or about multiply defined references). This is after latexmk has completed all
the runs it needs to try and resolve references and citations. Thus -Werror causes
latexmk to treat such warnings as errors, but only when they occur on the last run of
*latex and only after processing is complete. Also can be set by the configuration
variable $warnings_as_errors.

-xdv Generate xdv version of document using xelatex. (And turn off any incompatible
requests.)

-xelatex
Use xelatex. That is, use xelatex to process the source ﬁle(s). This will cause generation
of a pdf (but indirectly through a xdv ﬁle). (And turn off any incompatible requests.)

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This option is equivalent to using the following option

-pdfxe

[Note: Note that the method of implementation of this option, but not its intended
primary effect, differ from some earlier versions of latexmk. Latexmk first uses xelatex to
make an .xdv file, and does all the extra runs needed (including those of bibtex, etc).
Only after that does it make the pdf file from the .xdv file, using xdvipdfmx. See the
documentation for the -pdfxe for why this is done.]

-xelatex="COMMAND"
This sets the string specifying the command to run xelatex. It sets the variable $xelatex.

Warning: It is important to ensure that the -no-pdf is used when xelatex is invoked, since
latexmk expects xelatex to produce an .xdv file, not a .pdf file. If you provide %O in the
command specification, this will be done automatically. See the documentation for the
-pdfxe option for why latexmk makes a .xdv file rather than a .pdf file when xelatex is
used.

An example of the use of the -xelatex option:

latexmk -pdfxe -xelatex="xelatex --shell-escape %O %S" foo.tex

Note: This option when provided with the COMMAND argument only sets the command
for invoking xelatex; it does not turn on the use of lualatex. That is done by other options
or in an initialization ﬁle.

Compatibility between options

The preview-continuous option -pvc can only work with one ﬁle. So in this case you will
normally only specify one ﬁlename on the command line.
Options -p, -pv and -pvc are mutually exclusive. So each of these options turns the others off.

EXAMPLES
% latexmk thesis # run latex enough times to resolve
cross-references

% latexmk -pvc -ps thesis # run latex enough times to resolve

cross-references, make a postscript
file, start a previewer. Then
watch for changes in the source
file thesis.tex and any files it
uses. After any changes rerun latex
the appropriate number of times and
remake the postscript file. If latex
encounters an error, latexmk will
keep running, watching for

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source ﬁle changes.

% latexmk -c # remove .aux, .log, .bbl, .blg, .dvi,

.pdf, .ps & .bbl ﬁles

DEALING WITH ERRORS, PROBLEMS, ETC

Some possibilities:

a. If you get a strange error, do look carefully at the output that is on the screen and in log ﬁles.
While there is much that is notoriously verbose in the output of latex (and that is added to by
latexmk), the verbosity is there for a reason: to enable the user to diagnose problems. Latexmk
does repeat some messages at the end of a run that it thinks would otherwise be easy to miss in
the middle of other output.

b. Generally, remember that latexmk does its work by running other programs. Your ﬁrst priority
in dealing with errors should be to examine what went wrong with the individual programs.
Then you need to correct the causes of errors in the runs of these programs. (Often these come
from errors in the source document, but they could also be about missing LaTeX packages, etc.)

c. If latexmk doesn’t run the programs the way you would like, then you need to look in this
documentation at the list of command line options and then at the sections on
configuration/initialization files. A lot of latexmk’s behavior is configurable to deal with
particular situations. (But there is a lot of reading!)

The remainder of these notes consists of ideas for dealing with more difﬁcult situations.

d. Further tricks can involve replacing the standard commands that latexmk runs by other
commands or scripts.

e. For possible examples of code for use in an RC file, see the directory example_rcfiles in the
distribution of latexmk (e.g., at http://mirror.ctan.org/support/latexmk/example_rcfiles). Even if
these examples don’t do what you want, they may provide suitable inspiration.

f. There’s a useful trick that can be used when you use lualatex instead of pdflatex (and in some
related situations). The problem is that latexmk won’t notice a dependency on a file, bar.baz say,
that is input by the lua code in your document instead of by the LaTeX part. (Thus if you change
bar.baz and rerun latexmk, then latexmk will think no files have changed and not rerun lualatex,
whereas if you had ’\input{bar.baz}’ in the LaTeX part of the document, latexmk would notice
the change.) One solution is just to put the following somewhere in the LaTeX part of the
document:

\typeout{(bar.baz)}

This puts a line in the log file that latexmk will treat as implying that the file bar.baz was read.
(At present I don’t know a way of doing this automatically.) Of course, if the file has a different
name, change bar.baz to the name of your file.

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g. See also the section "Advanced Conﬁguration: Some extra resources".

h. Look on tex.stackexchange, i.e., at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latexmk

Someone may have already solved your problem.

i. Ask a question at tex.stackexchange.com.

j. Or ask me (the author of latexmk). My e-mail is at the end of this documentation.

AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES

Running *latex and the associated programs generate a number of files, it is often convenient to
arrange for the generated files to be in a different directory than the source file(s) of a document.
For our purposes here, we identify two classes of generated file.

One class is what one may term the final output files, for example, the .pdf file generated by
running pdflatex, or the .dvi file from latex. Also in this class is the ps file generated by applying
dvips to a .dvi file. There are also .synctec or .synctex.gz files that can be used by programs that
display .pdf files and the like to relate positions in them to positions in source files.

The second class of file is composed of all other generated files: These include notably .aux files
that are used for implementing cross referencing, and are both generated on one run and read on a
later run. Many packages generate yet more such intermediate files, as well as programs like
bibtex, makeindex, etc. There are also .log files from *latex and corresponding files from other
programs.

Let us use the term "output directory" for the directory that receives the final output files, and
"aux directory" for the directory for the other generated files. If no special options are provided
to the *latex programs, these directories default to the current directory, and then the generated
files aren’t segregated. If the two directories are the same, as is the simplest situation, then all
generated files are written to the same directory, and one often simply refers to the output
directory, without mentioning a separate aux directory.

Support for them is provided for them in the *latex programs: by the single option -output-
directory for the TeXLive implementations, and by the options -aux-directory and -output-
directory for the MiKTeX implementations. Special support like this is needed for two reasons:
First is that there are many packages that write files and it needs to be arranged that these are
automatically written to the appropriate directory without any rewriting of the packages’ code.
Second is that the files are often read in again on subsequent runs of *latex, and it is necessary
that the program knows where to find the files.

A complication is that the TeXLive implementation does not allow for separate aux and output
directories. Latexmk deals with this by being able to emulating a separate aux directory: In this
method it invokes *latex with just an -output-directory option, with the directory set not to the
desired output directory, but to the aux directory. After running *latex, it moves the relevant final
output file(s) to the intended output directory. Emulation can be turned on by setting the
configuration variable $emulate_aux to one in a configuration file or by using latexmk’s
-emulate-aux-dir option. The emulation method works equally well if MiKTeX is used.

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Latexmk also turns emulation on if it is found to be needed, as follows. Suppose emulation is

initially off, but the aux and output directories are different. Then latexmk invokes *latex with an
-aux-directory option and after the run finds that it hasn’t been obeyed, notably because the .log
file is in the output directory rather than the aux directory. Latexmk then sets emulation on, and
retries. Conceivably, it could move all the appropriate generated files from the output directory to
the aux directory; but there is such a large variety of possibilities for these files that this is hard to
identify all of them reliably except for simple cases.

Note that the emulation issue only arises when the user has arranged for the the aux and output
directories to be different. When instead they are equal, e.g., because the user only set the
$out_dir variable, then latexmk invokes *latex with only an -output-directory option, which
works as intended with both TeXLive and MiKTeX.

In addition, latexmk arranges the invocations of any auxiliary programs like bibtex and
makeindex so that they will read and write the relevant ﬁles from and to the aux directory.
Programs like dvips, dvipdf, ps2pdf, and xdvipdfmx are invoked so that they read from the
appropriate places and write their output to the output directory.

Files considered as final output files, i.e., those that belong in the output directory rather than the
aux directory: These have the extensions .dvi, .ps., .pdf, .synctex, and .synctex.gz. A special
case, because of compatibility issues, is of .fls files: See below.

Note that xelatex when invoked with its -no-pdf option, as latexmk does, generates an .xdv file,
which would appear to have the same status as a .dvi file generated by latex. Nevertheless,
latexmk treats .xdv as an intermediate file that is found in the aux directory. This is to match
MiKTeX’s treatment of the -aux-directory option. As further justification, one can say that
under modern conditions an .xdv file is (almost) always an intermediate file. Historically, the
situation with .dvi files from latex was different, and currently dvi previewers do exist.

Variables and options for directories: The variables for setting the aux and output directories are
$aux_dir and $out_dir, with corresponding command line options -auxdir (or -aux-directory)
and -outdir (or -output-directory). When a value for these is blank (which is the default value),
it implies the use of a default: For the aux directory, the default is to set it equal to the output
directory. For the output directory, the default is to be the current directory.

For the turning on and off of the emulation mode, there is the conﬁguration variable
$emulate_aux and the options -emulate-aux-dir, -emulate-aux-dir-, -noemulate-aux-dir.

Interaction with -cd option: When the -cd option is used (or the equivalent setting of $do_cd
variable), then latexmk changes the working directory to the document directory before invoking
*latex. If the aux and/or output directories are given by relative paths, e.g., by -outdir=output
for a directory named "output", then the directories are relative to the document directory, rather
than relative to the working directory that was in effect when latexmk was invoked. This matches
the behavior of *latex as invoked with the provided command line directory argument(s) after the
change of working directory to the document directory.

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Automatic creation of aux and output directories: Unlike *latex, if latexmk ﬁnds the requested
directory/ies don’t exist, it creates it/them, thereby avoiding errors when *latex is invoked.

If the document uses the \include macro to read a .tex file from a subdirectory, *latex will attempt
to write an extra aux file to the corresponding subdirectory of the aux directory. If the
subdirectory doesn’t exist, then *latex will complain that it can’t write the aux file. After the run
of *latex, latexmk detects this situation, creates the necessary directory, and reruns *latex with
the error situation corrected.

Choice of aux and output directories: Often the aux and output directories are given as
subdirectories of the document directory, e.g., by -outdir=output. But it is possible to provide,
for example, an absolute path or a path relative to a parent directory, e.g., "/tmp/foo" or
"../output". Be aware that in general this can cause problems, notably with makeindex or bibtex.
This is because modern versions of these programs, by default, will refuse to work when they
find that they are asked to write to a file in a directory that appears not to be the current working
directory or one of its subdirectories. This is part of security measures by the whole TeX system
that try to prevent malicious or errant TeX documents from incorrectly messing with a user’s
files.

By default, latexmk evades this issue: Before running bibtex and makeindex, latexmk changes
working directory to the aux directory, with appropriate settings of search paths. The use or non-
use of this trick is governed by the variables $bibtex_fudge and $makeindex_fudge.
Unfortunately, the trick sometimes makes bibtex and makeindex unable to ﬁnd ﬁles.

If necessary the trick can be turned off. But this is incompatible with an aux directory like,
"/tmp/foo" of "../output"). If you really have to deal with this situation, and only if you have to
deal with it, then you need to disable the security measures (and assume any risks). One way of
doing this is to temporarily set an operating system environment variable openout_any to "a" (as
in "all"), to override the default "paranoid" setting.

Certain names of aux and output directories not allowed on Microsoft Windows: It is natural to
want to use the name "aux" for the aux directory, e.g., by using the option -auxdir=aux. But on
Microsoft operating systems "aux" is one of the names that is not allowed for a ﬁle or directory. I
ﬁnd it useful to standardize on a name like "auxdir" (e.g., by -auxdir=auxdir); this works
independently of operating system.

Location of .fls file: Much of the dependency information that latexmk uses comes from the .fls
file generated when *latex is invoked with the -recorder option, which latexmk does by default.
It may seem rational that this is written to the aux directory. But in fact versions of MiKTeX
prior to Oct. 2020 wrote it to the output directory. Later versions do write it to the aux directory.
To deal with this, latexmk does two things: First, if latexmk finds that the .fls file has only been
generated in the "wrong" directory, then latexmk copies it to the expected directory, after which
latexmk’s operation continues correctly independently of the behavior of *latex. Second it allows
its idea of the "correct" (or expected) directory to be configured by the variable
$fls_uses_aux_dir. This defaults to zero, to correspond to MiKTeX’s current behavior.

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ALLOWING FOR CHANGE OF OUTPUT FILE TYPE

When one of the latex engines is run, the usual situation is that latex produces a .dvi file, while
pdflatex and lualatex produce a .pdf file. For xelatex the default is to produce a .pdf file, but to
optimize processing time latexmk runs xelatex its -no-pdf option so that it produces an .xdv file.
Further processing by latexmk takes this as a starting point.

However, the actual output file may differ from the normal expectation; and then latexmk can
adjust its processing to accommodate this situation. The difference in output file type can happen
for two reasons: One is that for latex, pdflatex and lualatex the document itself can override the
defaults. The other is that there may be a configuration, or misconfiguration, such that the
program that latexmk invokes to compile the document is not the expected one, or is given
options incompatible with what latexmk initially expects.

Under latex and pdﬂatex, control of the output format by the document is done by setting the
\pdfoutput macro. Under lualatex, the \outputmode macro is used instead.

One example of an important use-case for document control of the output format is a document
that uses the psfrag package to insert graphical elements in the output file. The psfrag package
achieves its effects by inserting postscript code in the output of the compilation of the document.
This entails the use of compilation to a .dvi file, followed by the use of conversion to a postscript
file (either directly, as by dvips or implicitly, as an intermediate step by dvipdf). Then it is useful
to force output to be of the .dvi format by inserting \pdfoutput=0 in the preamble of the
document.

Another example is where the document uses graphics ﬁle of the .pdf, .jpg, and png types. With
the default setting for the graphicx package, these can be processed in compilation to .pdf but not
with compilation to .dvi. In this case, it is useful to insert \pdfoutput=1 in the preamble of the
document to force compilation to .pdf output format.

In all of these cases, it is needed that latexmk has to adjust its processing to deal with a mismatch
between the actual output format (out of .pdf, .dvi, .xdv) and the initially expected output, if
possible. Latexmk does this provided the following conditions are met.

The first is that latexmk’s $allow_switch configuration variable is set to a non-zero value as it is
by default. If this variable is zero, a mismatch of filetypes in the compilation results in an error.

The second condition for latexmk to be able to handle a change of output type is that no explicit
requests for .dvi or .ps output files are made. Explicit requests are by the -dvi and -ps,
-print=dvi, -print=ps, -view=dvi, and -view=ps options, and by corresponding settings of the
$dvi_mode, $postscript_mode, $print_type, and $view configuration variables. The print-type
and view-type restrictions only apply when printing and viewing are explicitly requested,
respectively. For this purpose, the use of the -pdfdvi and -pdfps options (and the corresponding
setting of the $pdf_mode variable) does not count as an explicit request for the .dvi and .ps files;
they are merely regarded as a request for making a .pdf file together with an initial proposal for
the processing route to make it.

Note that when accommodating a change in output ﬁle type, there is involved a substantial
change in the network of rules that latexmk uses in its actions. The second condition applied to

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accommodate a change is to avoid situations where the change in the rule network is too radical
to be readily handled automatically.

CONFIGURATION/INITIALIZATION (RC) FILES

In this section is explained which configuration files are read by latexmk. Subsequent sections
"How to Set Variables in Initialization Files", "Format of Command Specifications", "List of
Configuration Variables Usable in Initialization Files", "Custom Dependencies", and "Advanced
Configuration" give details on what can be configured and how.

Latexmk can be customized using initialization files, which are read at startup in the following
order:
1) The system RC file, if it exists.
On a UNIX system, latexmk searches the following directories for a
system RC file, which may be named either "LatexMk" or "latexmkrc". The
directories are searched in the following order, and latexmk uses
the first such file it finds (if any):
"/etc",
"/opt/local/share/latexmk",
"/usr/local/share/latexmk",
"/usr/local/lib/latexmk".
On a MS-Windows system it looks just in "C:\latexmk".
On a cygwin system (i.e., a MS-Windows system in which Perl is that of cygwin), latexmk
looks in the directories
"/cygdrive/c/latexmk",
"/etc",
"/opt/local/share/latexmk",
"/usr/local/share/latexmk",
"/usr/local/lib/latexmk".

If the environment variable LATEXMKRCSYS is set, its value is used as the name of the system
RC file, instead of any of the above.
2) The user’s RC file, if it exists. This can be in one of two places. The traditional one is
".latexmkrc" in the user’s home directory. The other possibility is "latexmk/latexmkrc" in the
user’s XDG configuration home directory. The actual file read is the first of
"$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/latexmk/latexmkrc" or "$HOME/.latexmkrc" which exists. (See
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html for details on the
XDG Base Directory Specification.)

Here $HOME is the user’s home directory. [Latexmk determines the user’s home directory as
follows: It is the value of the environment variable HOME, if this variable exists, which
normally is the case on UNIX-like systems (including Linux and OS-X). Otherwise the
environment variable USERPROFILE is used, if it exists, which normally is the case on MS-
Windows systems. Otherwise a blank string is used instead of $HOME, in which case latexmk
does not look for an RC ﬁle in it.]

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is the value of the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME if it

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exists. If this environment variable does not exist, but $HOME is non-blank, then
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set to the default value of $HOME/.conﬁg. Otherwise
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is blank, and latexmk does not look for an RC ﬁle under it.

3) The RC file in the current working directory. This file can be named either "latexmkrc" or
".latexmkrc", and the first of these to be found is used, if any.
4) Any RC file(s) specified on the command line with the -r option.
Each RC file is a sequence of Perl commands. Naturally, a user can use this in creative ways.
But for most purposes, one simply uses a sequence of assignment statements that override some
of the built-in settings of Latexmk. Straightforward cases can be handled without knowledge of
the Perl language by using the examples in this document as templates. Comment lines are
introduced by the "#" character.

Note that command line options are obeyed in the order in which they are written; thus any RC
file specified on the command line with the -r option can override previous options but can be
itself overridden by later options on the command line. There is also the -e option, which allows
initialization code to be specified in latexmk’s command line.

For possible examples of code for in an RC file, see the directory example_rcfiles in the
distribution of latexmk (e.g., at http://mirror.ctan.org/support/latexmk/example_rcfiles).

HOW TO SET VARIABLES IN INITIALIZATION FILES

The important variables that can be configured are described in the section "List of configuration
variables usable in initialization files". (See the earlier section "Configuration/Initialization (rc)
Files" for the files where the configurations are done.) Syntax for setting these variables is of the
following forms:
$bibtex = ’bibtex %O %S’;
for the setting of a string variable,
$preview_mode = 1;
for the setting of a numeric variable, and
@default_files = (’paper’, ’paper1’);
for the setting of an array of strings. It is possible to append an item to an array variable as
follows:

push @default_ﬁles, ’paper2’;

Note that simple "scalar" variables have names that begin with a $ character and array variables
have names that begin with a @ character. Each statement ends with a semicolon.

Strings should be enclosed in single quotes. (You could use double quotes, as in many
programming languages. But then the Perl programming language brings into play some special
rules for interpolating variables into strings. People not ﬂuent in Perl will want to avoid these
complications.)

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You can do much more complicated things, but for this you will need to consult a manual for the
Perl programming language.

FORMAT OF COMMAND SPECIFICATIONS

Some of the variables set the commands that latexmk uses for carrying out its work, for example
to generate a .dvi file from a .tex file or to view a postscript file. This section describes some
important features of how the commands are specified. (Note that some of the possibilities listed
here do not apply to the $kpsewhich variable; see its documentation.)

Placeholders: Supposed you wanted latexmk to use the command elatex in place of the regular
latex command, and suppose moreover that you wanted to give it the option "--shell-escape".
You could do this by the following setting:
$latex = ’elatex --shell-escape %O %S’;
The two items starting with the % character are placeholders. These are substituted by
appropriate values before the command is run. Thus %S will be replaced by the source ﬁle that
elatex will be applied to, and %O will be replaced by any options that latexmk has decided to use
for this command. (E.g., if you used the -silent option in the invocation of latexmk, it results in
the replacement of %O by "-interaction=batchmode".)

The available placeholders are:

%A basename of the main tex file. Unlike %R, this is unaffected by the setting of a jobname
by the -jobname option or the $jobname configuration value.
%B base of filename for current command. E.g., if a postscript file document.ps is being
made from the dvi file document.dvi, then the basename is document.
%D destination file (e.g., the name of the postscript file when converting a dvi file to
postscript).
%O options
%P If the variable $pre_tex_code is non-empty, then %P is substituted by the contents of
$pre_tex_code followed by \input{SOURCE}, where SOURCE stands for the name of
the source file. Appropriate quoting is done. This enables TeX code to be passed to one
of the *latex engines to be executed before the source file is read.

If the variable $pre_tex_code is the empty string, then %P is equivalent to %S.

%R root ﬁlename.

By default this is the basename of the main tex file. However the value can be changed
by the use of the -jobname option or the $jobname configuration variable. This is then
the basename for files like the .aux and .log files produced by running *latex, as well for
the main .dvi, .pdf, .ps and/or .xdvi files.
%S source file (e.g., the name of the dvi file when converting a .dvi file to ps).
%T The name of the primary tex file.

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%U If the variable $pre_tex_code is non-empty, then its value is substituted for %U

(appropriately quoted). Otherwise it is replaced by a null string.
%Y Name of directory for auxiliary output files (see the configuration variable $aux_dir). A
directory separation character (’/’) is appended if $aux_dir is non-empty and does not
end in a suitable character, with suitable characters being those appropriate to UNIX and
MS-Windows, i.e., ’:’, ’/’ and ’\’. Note that if after initialization, $out_dir is set, but
$aux_dir is not set (i.e., it is blank), then latexmk sets $aux_dir to the same value
$out_dir.
%Z Name of directory for output files (see the configuration variable $out_dir). A directory
separation character (’/’) is appended if $out_dir is non-empty and does not end in a
suitable character, with suitable characters being those appropriate to UNIX and MS-
Windows, i.e., ’:’, ’/’ and ’\’.
If for some reason you need a literal % character in your string not subject to the above rules, use
"%%".
Appropriate quoting will be applied to the filename substitutions, so you mustn’t supply them
yourself even if the names of your files have spaces in them. (But if your TeX filenames have
spaces in them, beware that some older versions of the TeX program cannot correctly handle
filenames containing spaces.) In case latexmk’s quoting does not work correctly on your system,
you can turn it off -- see the documentation for the variable $quote_filenames.
See the default values in the section "List of configuration variables usable in initialization files"
for what is normally the most appropriate usage.

If you omit to supply any placeholders whatever in the specification of a command, latexmk will
supply what its author thinks are appropriate defaults. This gives compatibility with
configuration files for previous versions of latexmk, which didn’t use placeholders.

"Detaching" a command: Normally when latexmk runs a command, it waits for the command
to run to completion. This is appropriate for commands like latex, of course. But for previewers,
the command should normally run detached, so that latexmk gets the previewer running and then
returns to its next task (or exits if there is nothing else to do). To achieve this effect of detaching
a command, you need to precede the command name with "start ", as in
$dvi_previewer = ’start xdvi %O %S’;
This will be translated to whatever is appropriate for your operating system.

Notes: (1) In some circumstances, latexmk will always run a command detached. This is the case
for a previewer in preview continuous mode, since otherwise previewing continuously makes no
sense. (2) This precludes the possibility of running a command named start. (3) If the word start
occurs more than once at the beginning of the command string, that is equivalent to having just
one. (4) Under cygwin, some complications happen, since cygwin amounts to a complicated
merging of UNIX and MS-Windows. See the source code for how I’ve handled the problem.

Command names containing spaces: Under MS-Windows it is common that the name of a
command includes spaces, since software is often installed in a subdirectory of "C:\Program
Files". Such command names should be enclosed in double quotes, as in
$lpr_pdf = ’"c:/Program Files/Ghostgum/gsview/gsview32.exe" /p %S’;

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$pdf_previewer = ’start "c:/Program Files/SumatraPDF/SumatraPDF.exe" %O %S’;

$pdf_previewer = ’start "c:/Program Files/SumatraPDF (x86)/SumatraPDF.exe" %O %S’;

(Note about the above example: Under MS-Windows forward slashes are equivalent to
backslashes in a ﬁlename under almost all circumstances, provided that the ﬁlename is inside
double quotes. It is easier to use forward slashes in examples like the one above, since then one
does not have to worry about the rules for dealing with forward slashes in strings in the Perl
language.)

Command names under Cygwin: If latexmk is executed by Cygwin’s Perl, be particularly

certain that pathnames in commands have forward slashes not the usual backslashes for the
separator of pathname components. See the above examples. Backslashes often get
misinterpreted by the Unix shell used by Cygwin’s Perl to execute external commands. Forward
slashes don’t suffer from this problem, and (when quoted, as above) are equally acceptable to
MS-Windows.

Using MS-Windows file associations: A useful trick under modern versions of MS-Windows
(e.g., WinXP) is to use just the command ’start’ by itself:
$dvi_previewer = ’start %S’;
Under MS-Windows, this will cause to be run whatever program the system has associated with
dvi files. (The same applies for a postscript viewer and a pdf viewer.) But note that this trick is
not always suitable for the pdf previwer, if your system has acroread for the default pdf viewer.
As explained elsewhere, acroread under MS-Windows does not work well with latex and latexmk,
because acroread locks the pdf file.

Not using a certain command: If a command is not to be run, the command name NONE is
used, as in
$lpr = ’NONE lpr’;
This typically is used when an appropriate command does not exist on your system. The string
after the "NONE" is effectively a comment.

Options to commands: Setting the name of a command can be used not only for changing the
name of the command called, but also to add options to command. Suppose you want latexmk to
use latex with source specials enabled. Then you might use the following line in an initialization
ﬁle:
$latex = ’latex --src-specials %O %S’;
Running a subroutine instead of an external command: Use a speciﬁcation starting with
"internal", as in
$latex = ’internal mylatex %O %S’;
sub mylatex {
my @args = @_;
# Possible preprocessing here
return system ’latex’, @args;
}
For some of the more exotic possibilities that then become available, see the section "Advanced

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conﬁguration: Some extra resources and advanced tricks". Also see some of the examples in the
directory example_rcﬁles in the latexmk distribution.

Advanced tricks: Normally one specifies a single command for the commands invoked by
latexmk. Naturally, if there is some complicated additional processing you need to do in your
special situation, you can write a script (or batch file) to do the processing, and then configure
latexmk to use your script in place of the standard program.

You can also use a Perl subroutine instead of a script -- see above. This is generally the most
ﬂexible and portable solution.

It is also possible to configure latexmk to run multiple commands. For example, if when running
pdflatex to generate a pdf file from a tex file you need to run another program after pdflatex to
perform some extra processing, you could do something like:

$pdﬂatex = ’pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S; pst2pdf_for_latexmk %B’;

This deﬁnition assumes you are using a UNIX-like system (which includes Linux and OS-X), so
that the two commands to be run are separated by the semicolon in the middle of the string.

If you are using MS-Windows, you would replace the above line by

$pdﬂatex = ’cmd /c pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S’

. ’&& pst2pdf_for_latexmk %B’;

Here, the UNIX command separator ; is replaced by &&. In addition, there is a problem that
some versions of Perl on MS-Windows do not obey the command separator; this problem is
overcome by explicitly invoking the MS-Windows command-line processor cmd.exe.

LIST OF CONFIGURATION VARIABLES USABLE IN INITIALIZATION FILES

In this section are specified the variables whose values can be adjusted to configure latexmk. (See
the earlier section "Configuration/Initialization (rc) Files" for the files where the configurations
are done.)

Default values are indicated in brackets. Note that for variables that are boolean in character,
concerning whether latexmk does or does not behave in a certain way, a non-zero value, normally
1, indicates true, i.e., the behavior occurs, while a zero value indicates a false value, i.e., the
behavior does not occur.

$allow_subdir_creation [1]

Specify action to take when message(s) in the .log ﬁle indicate a failure of an attempt by
a *latex compilation to write a ﬁle to a subdirectory of the output directory because the
subdirectory didn’t exist.

If the value if $allow_subdir_creation is 0, no action is taken. If it is 1, then the

appropriate subdirectory is created and a rerun of *latex is triggered, but only if the ﬁle

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being written is an .aux file. (This happens, for example, if the document includes a file
from a subdirectory of the document directory, by the \include command. If the value of
$allow_subdir_creation is 2, then the subdirectory creation is done independently of
which type of file is in question.

$allow_switch [1]

This controls what happens when the output extension of latex, pdflatex, lualatex or
xelatex differs from what is expected. (The possible extensions are .dvi, .pdf, .xdv.)
This can happen with the use of the \pdfoutput macro in a document compiled under
latex or pdflatex, or with the use of the \outputmode macro under lualatex. It can also
happen with certain kinds of incorrect configuration.

In such a case, latexmk can appropriately adjust its network of rules. The adjustment is
made if $allow_switch is on, and if no request for a dvi or ps ﬁle has been made.

See the section ALLOWING FOR CHANGE OF OUTPUT EXTENSION.

$always_view_file_via_temporary [0]
Whether .ps and .pdf files are initially to be made in a temporary directory and then
moved to the final location. (This applies to dvips, dvipdf, and ps2pdf operations, and
the filtering operators on .dvi and .ps files. It does not apply to pdflatex, unfortunately,
since pdflatex provides no way of specifying a chosen name for the output file.)

This use of a temporary file solves a problem that the making of these files can occupy a
substantial time. If a viewer (notably gv) sees that the file has changed, it may read the
new file before the program writing the file has not yet finished its work, which can
cause havoc.

See the $pvc_view_ﬁle_via_temporary variable for a setting that applies only if preview-
continuous mode (-pvc option) is used. See $tmpdir for the setting of the directory
where the temporary ﬁle is created.

$analyze_input_log_always [1]

After a run of latex (etc), always analyze .log for input files in the <...> and (...)
constructions. Otherwise, only do the analysis when fls file doesn’t exist or is out of
date.

Under normal circumstances, the data in the fls file is reliable, and the test of the log file
gets lots of false positives; usually $analyze_input_log_always is best set to zero. But
the test of the log file is needed at least in the following situation: When a user needs to
persuade latexmk that a certain file is a source file, and latexmk doesn’t otherwise find it.
Then the user can write code that causes a line with (...) to be written to log file. One
important case is for lualatex, which doesn’t always generate lines in the .fls file for
input lua files. (The situation with lualatex is HIGHLY version dependent, e.g., there
was a big change between TeXLive 2016 and TeXLive 2017.)

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To keep backward compatibility with older versions of latexmk, the default is to set
$analyze_input_log_always to 1.

$auto_rc_use [1]
Whether to automatically read the standard initialization (rc) files, which are the system
RC file, the user’s RC file, and the RC file in the current directory. The command line
option -norc can be used to turn this setting off. Each RC file could also turn this
setting off, i.e., it could set $auto_rc_use to zero to prevent automatic reading of the
later RC files.

This variable does not affect the reading of RC files specified on the command line by
the -r option.
$aux_dir [""]
The aux directory, i.e., the directory in which auxiliary files (aux, log, etc) are to be
written by a run of *latex.

If this variable is not set, but $out_dir is set, then latexmk takes the aux directory to
equal the output directory which is the directory to which ﬁnal output ﬁles are to be
written.

If neither variable is set, then the current directory when *latex is invoked is used both
for the aux and output directories.

If the aux and output directories are distinct, then the aux directory contains all
generated files with the exception of "final output files", which are defined to be .dvi,
.ps, .pdf, .synctex, and .synctex.gz files.

See the section AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES for more details.

$aux_out_dir_report [0]
If this variable is set to 1, then prior to the processing of each primary .tex ﬁle, list the
settings for aux and output directories, after they have been normalized from the settings
speciﬁed during initialization.

This report gives a reminder of where to look for generated ﬁles.

The report is done per primary .tex file, because of possible directory changes for each
file (when the -cd option is used). In the simplest cases, the directory names are the
same as originally specified. But in general some clean up/normalization is performed;
this helps performance and cleans up output to the screen.

If this variable is set to 2, then halt after reporting the settings for the aux and out
directories, rather than continuing with processing of tex ﬁles. This setting is primarily
used for debugging conﬁguration issues. See the -dir-report-only option.

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$bad_warning_is_error [0]
Whether to treat bad warnings reported by *latex in log ﬁle as errors. The speciﬁcations
of the warning messages are in @bad_warnings.

@bad_warnings
Array of regular expressions specifying messages in log ﬁle that are ofﬁcially treated as
warnings rather than errors by *latex, but which a user may treat as errors: See
$bad_warning_is_error.

Currently the default set of these warnings is those about \end occurring inside
constructs.

$banner [0]
If nonzero, the banner message is printed across each page when converting the dvi ﬁle
to postscript. Without modifying the variable $banner_message, this is equivalent to
specifying the -d option.

Note that if $banner is nonzero, the $postscript_mode is assumed and the postscript file
is always generated, even if it is newer than the dvi file.
$banner_intensity [0.95]
Equivalent to the -bi option, this is a decimal number between 0 and 1 that specifies how
dark to print the banner message. 0 is black, 1 is white. The default is just right if your
toner cartridge isn’t running too low.
$banner_message ["DRAFT"]
The banner message to print across each page when converting the dvi file to postscript.
This is equivalent to the -bm option.
$banner_scale [220.0]
A decimal number that specifies how large the banner message will be printed.
Experimentation is necessary to get the right scale for your message, as a rule of thumb
the scale should be about equal to 1100 divided by the number of characters in the
message. The Default is just right for 5 character messages. This is equivalent to the
-bs option.
@BIBINPUTS
This is an array variable, now mostly obsolete, that specifies directories where latexmk
should look for .bib files. By default it is set from the BIBINPUTS environment
variable of the operating system. If that environment variable is not set, a single element
list consisting of the current directory is set. The format of the directory names depends
on your operating system, of course. Examples for setting this variable are:

@BIBINPUTS = ( ".", "C:\\bibﬁles" );

@BIBINPUTS = ( ".", "\\server\bibfiles" );
@BIBINPUTS = ( ".", "C:/bibfiles" );
@BIBINPUTS = ( ".", "//server/bibfiles" );
@BIBINPUTS = ( ".", "/usr/local/texmf/bibtex/bib" );

Note that under MS Windows, either a forward slash "/" or a backward slash "\" can be

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used to separate pathname components, so the ﬁrst two and the second two examples are
equivalent. Each backward slash should be doubled to avoid running afoul of Perl’s
rules for writing strings. Generally, it is simplest always to use forward slashes instead
of backward slashes.

Important note: This variable is now mostly obsolete in the current version of latexmk,
since it now uses a better method of searching for ﬁles using the kpsewhich command.
However, if your system is an unusual one without the kpsewhich command, you may
need to set the variable @BIBINPUTS.

$biber ["biber %O %S"]

The biber processing program.

$biber_silent_switch ["--onlylog"]
Switch(es) for the biber processing program when silent mode is on.
$bibtex ["bibtex %O %S"]
The BibTeX processing program.
$bibtex_fudge [1]
When using bibtex, whether to change directory to $aux_dir before running bibtex.

The need arises as follows:

a. With bibtex before about 2019, if the filename given to it contains a path component,
there was a bug that bibtex would not find extra aux files, as produced by the \include
command in TeX.

b. With all moderately recent versions of bibtex, bibtex may refuse to write its bbl and
blg ﬁles, for security reasons, for certain cases of the path component of the ﬁlename
given to it.

However, there are also rare cases where the change-directory method prevents bibtex
from ﬁnding certain bib or bst ﬁles. Then $bibtex_fudge needs to be set to 0.

$bibtex_silent_switch ["-terse"]
Switch(es) for the BibTeX processing program when silent mode is on.

$bibtex_use [1]
Under what conditions to run bibtex or biber. When latexmk discovers from the log file
that one (or more) bibtex/biber-generated bibliographies are used, it can run bibtex or
biber whenever it appears necessary to regenerate the bbl file(s) from their source bib
database file(s). But sometimes, the bib file(s) are not available (e.g., for a document
obtained from an external archive), but the bbl files are provided. In that case use of
bibtex or biber will result in incorrect overwriting of the precious bbl files. The variable
$bibtex_use controls whether this happens, and also controls whether or not .bbl files are
deleted in a cleanup operation.

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The possible values of $bibtex_use are:

0: never use bibtex or biber; never delete .bbl files in a cleanup.
1: only use bibtex or biber if the bib file(s) exist; never
delete .bbl files in a cleanup.
1.5: only use bibtex or biber if the bib files exist;
conditionally delete .bbl files in a cleanup (i.e., delete them only when
the bib files all exist).
2: run bibtex or biber whenever it appears necessary to update the bbl file(s), without
testing for the existence of the bib files; always delete .bbl files in a cleanup.

Note: When biber is being used, conditional use of biber can be problematic. From
latexmk’s point of view the problem is that because of how biber works, a full
knowledge of its source files can only be obtained after running biber. In contrast, for
bibtex, full information on which bib files are used is obtained from the .aux file(s) after
a run of *latex. But for biber, the corresponding information is somewhat incomplete;
this the information obtained in the .bcf file that is generated by the biblatex package
during a run of *latex.

$cleanup_includes_cusdep_generated [0]
If nonzero, specifies that cleanup also deletes files that are generated by custom
dependencies. (When doing a clean up, e.g., by use of the -C option, custom
dependencies are those listed in the .fdb_latexmk file from a previous run.)

$cleanup_includes_generated [0]
If nonzero, specifies that cleanup also deletes files that are detected in the fls file (or
failing that, in log file) as being generated. It will also include files made from these
first generation generated files.

This operation is somewhat dangerous, and can have unintended consequences, since the
files to be deleted are determined from a file created by *latex, which can contain
erroneous information. Therefore this variable is turned off by default, and then files to
be deleted are restricted to those explicitly specified by patterns configured in the
variables clean_ext, clean_full_ext, and @generated_exts. Standard cases (e.g., .log
files) appear in latexmk’s initial value for the array @generated_exts.
$cleanup_mode [0]
If nonzero, specifies cleanup mode: 1 for full cleanup, 2 for cleanup except for .dvi, .ps
and .pdf files, 3 for cleanup except for dep and aux files. (There is also extra cleaning as
specified by the $clean_ext, $clean_full_ext and @generated_exts variables.)

This variable is equivalent to specifying one of the -c or -C options. But there should be
no need to set this variable from an RC ﬁle.
$clean_ext [""]
Extra extensions of ﬁles for latexmk to remove when any of the clean-up options (-c or
-C) is selected. The value of this variable is a string containing the extensions separated
by spaces.

It is also possible to specify a more general pattern of ﬁle to be deleted, by using the

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place holder %R, as in commands, and it is also possible to use wildcards. Thus setting

$clean_ext = "out %R-blx.bib %R-ﬁgures.log pythontex-ﬁles-%R/";

in an initialization file will imply that when a clean-up operation is specified, not only is
the standard set of files deleted, but also files of the form FOO.out, FOO-blx.bib, FOO-
figures*.log, and pythontex-files-FOO/*, where FOO stands for the basename of the file
being processed (as in FOO.tex).

Most of the ﬁles to be deleted are relative to the directory speciﬁed by $aux_dir. Note
that if $out_dir but not $aux_dir is set, then in its initialization, latexmk sets $aux_dir
equal to $out_dir. A normal situation is therefore that $aux_dir equals $out_dir, which
is the only case directly supported by TeXLive, unlike MiKTeX. Note that even with
TeXLive latexmk does now support different values for the directories -- see the
explanation of the $emulate_aux variable.

If $out_dir and $aux_dir different, latexmk actually deletes any files of the specified
names in both $aux_dir and $out_dir; this is because under certain error conditions, the
files may be put in $out_dir instead of $aux_dir. This also handles the case of deleting
any fls file, since that file is in $out_dir.

The filenames specified for a clean-up operation can refer not only to regular files but
also to directories. Directories are only deleted if they are empty. An example of an
application is to pythontex, which creates files in a particular directory. You can arrange
to remove both the files and the directory by setting

$clean_ext = "pythontex-ﬁles-%R/* pythontex-ﬁles-%R";

See also the (array) variable @generated_exts. In the past, this variable had certain uses
beyond that of $clean_ext. But now, they accomplish the same things. In fact, after
initialization including the processing of command line options, latexmk simply appends
the list of extensions in $clean_ext to the array @generated_exts.
$clean_full_ext [""]
Extra extensions of files for latexmk to remove when the -C option is selected, i.e.,
extensions of files to remove when the .dvi, etc files are to be cleaned-up.

More general patterns are allowed, as for $clean_ext.

The files specified by $clean_full_ext to be deleted are relative to the directory specified
by $out_dir.

$compiling_cmd [""], $failure_cmd [""], $warning_cmd [""], $success_cmd [""]

These variables specify commands that are executed at certain points of compilations.
One motivation for their existence is to allow very useful convenient visual indications
of compilation status even when the window receiving the screen output of the
compilation is hidden. This is particularly useful in preview-continuous mode.

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The commands are executed at the following points: $compiling_cmd at the start of
compilation, $success_cmd at the end of a completely successful compilation,
$failure_cmd at the end of an unsuccessful compilation, $warning_cmd at the of an
otherwise successful compilation that gives warnings about undefined citations or
references or about multiply defined references. If any of above variables is undefined or
blank (the default situation), then the corresponding command is not executed.

However, when $warning_cmd is not set, then in the case of a compilation with
warnings about references or citations, but with no other error, one or other of
$success_cmd or $failure_cmd is used (if it is set) according to the setting of
$warnings_as_errors.

An example of a simple setting of these variables is as follows

$compiling_cmd = "xdotool search --name \"%D\" set_window --name \"%D

compiling\"";
$success_cmd = "xdotool search --name \"%D\" set_window --name \"%D OK\"";
$warning_cmd = "xdotool search --name \"%D\" ".
"set_window --name \"%D CITE/REF ISSUE\"";
$failure_cmd = "xdotool search --name \"%D\" set_window --name \"%D
FAILURE\"";

These assume that the program xdotool is installed, that the previewer is using an X-
Window system for display, and that the title of the window contains the name of the
displayed file, as it normally does. When the commands are executed, the placeholder
string %D is replaced by the name of the destination file, which is the previewed file.
The above commands result in an appropriate string being appended to the filename in
the window title: " compiling", " OK", or " FAILURE".

Other placeholders that can be used are %S, %T, and %R, with %S and %T normally
being identical. These can be useful for a command changing the title of the edit
window. The visual indication in a window title can useful, since the user does not have
to keep shifting attention to the (possibly hidden) compilation window to know the
status of the compilation.

More complicated situations can best be handled by defining a Perl subroutine to invoke
the necessary commands, and using the "internal" keyword in the definitions to get the
subroutine to be invoked. (See the section "Format of Command Specifications" for
how to do this.)

Naturally, the above settings that invoke the xdotool program are only applicable when
the X-Window system is used for the relevant window(s). For other cases, you will have
to ﬁnd what software solutions are available.

@cus_dep_list [()]
Custom dependency list -- see section on "Custom Dependencies".

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@default_excluded_files [()]
When latexmk is invoked with no files specified on the command line, then, by default, it
will process all files in the current directory with the extension .tex. (In general, it will
process the files specified in the @default_files variable.)

But sometimes you want to exclude particular files from this default list. In that case
you can specify the excluded files in the array @default_excluded_files. For example if
you wanted to process all .tex files with the exception of common.tex, which is a not a
standard alone LaTeX file but a file input by some or all of the others, you could do

@default_ﬁles = ("*.tex");

@default_excluded_ﬁles = ("common.tex");

If you have a variable or large number of files to be processed, this method saves you
from having to list them in detail in @default_files and having to update the list every
time you change the set of files to be processed.

Notes: 1. This variable has no effect except when no files are specified on the latexmk
command line. 2. Wildcards are allowed in @default_excluded_files.
@default_files [("*.tex")]
Default list of files to be processed.

If no filenames are specified on the command line, latexmk processes all tex files
specified in the @default_files variable, which by default is set to all tex files ("*.tex") in
the current directory. This is a convenience: just run latexmk and it will process an
appropriate set of files. But sometimes you want only some of these files to be
processed. In this case you can list the files to be processed by setting @default_files in
an initialization file (e.g., the file "latexmkrc" in the current directory). Then if no files
are specified on the command line then the files you specify by setting @default_files
are processed.

Three examples:

@default_ﬁles = ("paper_current");

@default_ﬁles = ("paper1", "paper2.tex");

@default_ﬁles = (".tex", ".dtx");

Note that more than file may be given, and that the default extension is ".tex". Wild
cards are allowed. The parentheses are because @default_files is an array variable, i.e.,
a sequence of filename specifications is possible.

If you want latexmk to process all .tex ﬁles with a few exceptions, see the
@default_excluded_ﬁles array variable.

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$dependents_phony [0]
If a list of dependencies is output, this variable determines whether to include a phony
target for each source file. If you use the dependents list in a Makefile, the dummy rules
work around errors make gives if you remove header files without updating the Makefile
to match.
$dependents_list [0]
Whether to display a list(s) of dependencies at the end of a run.

$deps_escape ["none"]
This variable determines which kind of escaping of space characters to use in
dependency lists. The possible values are "none", "unix", "nmake", corresponding
respectively to no escaping, escaping with a "\" suitable for standard Unix make, and
escaping with "ˆ", suitable for Microsoft’s nmake.

Currently the only character escaped is a space, since that is particularly common in ﬁle
names and directory names. There are other characters that would need escaping if a
dependency list is to be used as-is by a make program; but those characters (e.g., "$")
commonly cause difﬁculties when used for .tex documents. Moreover, the detailed rules
for which characters need to be escaped depends on the version of make.

$deps_file ["-"]
Name of file to receive list(s) of dependencies at the end of a run, to be used if
$dependents_list is set. If the filename is "-", then the dependency list is set to stdout
(i.e., normally the screen).

$do_cd [0]
Whether to change working directory to the directory specified for the main source file
before processing it. The default behavior is not to do this, which is the same as the
behavior of *latex programs. This variable is set by the -cd and -cd- options on
latexmk’s command line.
$dvi_filter [empty]
The dvi file filter to be run on the newly produced dvi file before other processing.
Equivalent to specifying the -dF option.

$dvilualatex ["dvilualatex %O %S"]

Speciﬁes the command line to invoke the dvilualatex program. Note that as with other
programs, you can use this variable not just to change the name of the program used, but
also specify options to the program. E.g.,

$dvilualatex = "dvilualatex --src-specials %O %S";

To do a coordinated setting of all of $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex,

and $xelatex, see the section "Advanced Conﬁguration".

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$dvi_mode [See below for default]

If one, generate a dvi version of the document by use of latex. Equivalent to the -dvi
option.

If 2, generate a dvi version of the document by use of dvilualatex. Equivalent to the

-dvilua option.

The variable $dvi_mode defaults to 0, but if no explicit requests are made for other types
of file (postscript, pdf), then $dvi_mode will be set to 1. In addition, if a request for a
file for which a .dvi file is a prerequisite and $dvi_mode is zero, then $dvi_mode is set
to 1.

$dvilualatex_silent_switch ["-interaction=batchmode"]
Switch(es) for the dvilualatex program (speciﬁed in the variable $dvilualatex) when
silent mode is on.

See details of the $latex_silent_switch for other information that equally applies to
$dvilualatex_silent_switch.

$dvi_previewer ["start xdvi %O %S" under UNIX]

The command to invoke a dvi-previewer. [Under MS-Windows the default is "start";
then latexmk arranges to use the MS-Windows start program, which will cause to be run
whatever command the system has associated with .dvi ﬁles.]

Important note: Normally you will want to have a previewer run detached, so that
latexmk doesn’t wait for the previewer to terminate before continuing its work. So
normally you should prefix the command by "start ", which flags to latexmk that it
should do the detaching of the previewer itself (by whatever method is appropriate to the
operating system). But sometimes letting latexmk do the detaching is not appropriate
(for a variety of non-trivial reasons), so you should put the "start " bit in yourself,
whenever it is needed.
$dvi_previewer_landscape ["start xdvi %O %S"]
The command to invoke a dvi-previewer in landscape mode. [Under MS-Windows the
default is "start"; then latexmk arranges to use the MS-Windows start program, which
will cause to be run whatever command the system has associated with .dvi files.]
$dvipdf ["dvipdf -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY %O %S %D"]
Command to convert .dvi to .pdf file. A common reconfiguration is to use the dvipdfm
command, which needs its arguments in a different order:

$dvipdf = "dvipdfm %O -o %D %S";

WARNING: The default dvipdf script generates pdf files with bitmapped fonts, which
do not look good when viewed by acroread. That script should be modified to give
dvips the options "-P pdf" to ensure that type 1 fonts are used in the pdf file.

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$dvipdf_silent_switch ["-q"]
Switch(es) for dvipdf program when silent mode is on.

N.B. The standard dvipdf program runs silently, so adding the silent switch has no
effect, but is actually innocuous. But if an alternative program is used, e.g., dvipdfmx,
then the silent switch has an effect. The default setting is correct for dvipdfm and
dvipdfmx.
$dvips ["dvips %O -o %D %S"]
The program to used as a filter to convert a .dvi file to a .ps file. If pdf is going to be
generated from pdf, then the value of the $dvips_pdf_switch variable -- see below -- will
be included in the options substituted for "%O".
$dvips_landscape ["dvips -tlandscape %O -o %D %S"]
The program to used as a filter to convert a .dvi file to a .ps file in landscape mode.
$dvips_pdf_switch ["-P pdf"]
Switch(es) for dvips program when pdf file is to be generated from .ps file.
$dvips_silent_switch ["-q"]
Switch(es) for dvips program when silent mode is on.
$dvi_update_command [""]
When the dvi previewer is set to be updated by running a command, this is the command
that is run. See the information for the variable $dvi_update_method for further
information, and see information on the variable $pdf_update_method for an example
for the analogous case of a pdf previewer.
$dvi_update_method [2 under UNIX, 1 under MS-Windows]
How the dvi viewer updates its display when the dvi file has changed. The values here
apply equally to the $pdf_update_method and to the $ps_update_method variables.
0 => update is automatic,
1=> manual update by user, which may only mean a mouse click on the viewer’s
window or may mean a more serious action.
2 => Send the signal, whose number is in the variable $dvi_update_signal. The
default value under UNIX is suitable for xdvi.
3 => Viewer cannot do an update, because it locks the file. (As with acroread under
MS-Windows.)
4 => run a command to do the update. The command is specified by the variable
$dvi_update_command.

See information on the variable $pdf_update_method for an example of updating by

command.
$dvi_update_signal [Under UNIX: SIGUSR1, which is a system-dependent value]
The number of the signal that is sent to the dvi viewer when it is updated by sending a
signal -- see the information on the variable $dvi_update_method. The default value is
the one appropriate for xdvi on a UNIX system.
$emulate_aux [1]
Whether to emulate the use of aux directory when $aux_dir and $out_dir are different,
rather than using the -aux-directory option for the *latex programs. (MiKTeX supports
-aux-directory, but TeXLive doesn’t.)

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If you use a version of *latex that doesn’t support -aux-directory, e.g., TeXLive,
latexmk will automatically switch aux_dir emulation on after the first run of *latex,
because it will find the .log file in the wrong place. But it is better to set $emulate_aux
to 1 in an rc file, or equivalently to use the -emulate-aux-dir option. This emulation
mode works equally well with MiKTeX.

Aux directory emulation means that when *latex is invoked, the output directory
provided to *latex is set to be the desired aux directory. After that, any files that need to
be in the output directory will be moved there by latexmk. (These are the files with
extensions .dvi, .ps, .pdf, .synctex, .synctex.gz, and, depending on the setting of the
$fls_uses_out_dir variable, also the .fls file.)

$failure_cmd [undeﬁned]
See the documentation for $compiling_cmd.

$fdb_ext ["fdb_latexmk"]
The extension of the ﬁle which latexmk generates to contain a database of information
on source ﬁles. You will not normally need to change this.

@file_not_found
This an array of Perl regular expressions that are patterns to find messages in the .log file
from a run of *latex that indicate that a file was looked for and not found. To see the
current default set, you should look at the definition of @file_not_found in the
latexmk.pl file.

In the regular expression, the string for the name of the missing ﬁle should be enclosed
in parentheses. That carries the implication that after latexmk gets a successful match to
the pattern, the variable $1 is set to the ﬁlename, which is then picked up by latexmk.

If you happen to encounter a package that gives a missing ﬁle message of a different
form than one that matches one of the built-in patterns, you can add another pattern to
the array. An example would be

push @ﬁle_not_found, ’ˆNo ﬁle\\s+(.+)\\s*$’;

The regular expression itself is

ˆMissing ﬁle\s+(.+)\s*$

But the corresponding string speciﬁcation in the push statement has to have the
backslashes doubled.

This regular expression matches a line that starts with ’No file’, then has one or more
white space characters, then any number of characters forming the filename, then
possible white space, and finally the end of the line. (See documentation on Perl regular
expressions for details.)

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$filetime_causality_threshold [5]
The use of this variable is as follows: At a number of places, latexmk needs to
determine whether a particular file has been produced during a just-concluded run of
some rule/program or is leftover from a previous run. (An example is the production of a
.bcf file by the biblatex package during a run of *latex to provide bibliographic
information to the biber program. If a .bcf file is not produced during a current run of
*latex, but is leftover from a previous run, then latexmk has to conclude that the .tex
document has changed so that biber is no longer to be used.)

Latexmk’s criterion that a file has been produced during a run is that the modification
time of the file is more recent than the system time at the beginning of the run.
Bascially, if the modification time is earlier than this, then it is a leftover from a previous
run. However, a naive use of the criterion can, among other things, run afoul of the
granularity of how file times are stored in some file systems, which means it is possible
that the filesystem’s reported time for a file might be a second or more earlier than the
actual modification time, the exact difference being quite random.

The variable $ﬁletime_causality_threshold allows an appopriate sloppiness in latexmk’s

use of file modification time. It can be quite generous; it should merely be less than the
time scale on which a human user makes changes to source files for a document (or to
configuration files, etc).

$fls_uses_out_dir [0]
This variable determines whether or not the .fls file should be in the output directory
instead of the natural directory, which is the aux directory. If the variable is nonzero, the
.fls file is to be in the output directory. See the section AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT
DIRECTORIES for more details about these directories. The rationale for the existence
of the variable $fls_uses_aux_dir is explained there.

In all cases, if latexmk finds that an .fls file has been generated in the opposite directory
to the one specified by $fls_uses_out_dir, it copies the file to the other directory (aux or
output directory as appropriate). The file is copied rather than simply moved, to avoid
potential clashes with other software that assumes the .fls file is generated in the
directory it was written to by *latex. Thus the effect an incorrect setting of
$fls_uses_out_dir is only to cause a superfluous copy of the .fls file to be generated.

$force_mode [0]
If nonzero, continue processing past minor latex errors including unrecognized cross
references. Equivalent to specifying the -f option.

@generated_exts [( ’aux’, ’bcf’, ’ﬂs’, ’idx’, ’ind’, ’lof’, ’lot’, ’out’, ’toc’, ’blg’, ’ilg’, ’log’,
’xdv’ )]

This contains a list of extensions for ﬁles that are generated during processing, and that
should be deleted during a main clean up operation, as invoked by the command line
option -c. (The use of -C or -gg gives this clean up and more.)

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The default values are extensions for standard ﬁles generated by *latex, bibtex, and the
like. (Note that the clean up also deletes the fdb_latexmk ﬁle, but that’s separately
coded into latexmk, currently.)

After initialization of latexmk and the processing of its command line, the items in
clean_ext are appended to @generated_exts. So these two variables have the same
meaning (contrary to older versions of latexmk).

The items in @generated_exts are normally extensions of ﬁles, whose base name is the
same as the main tex ﬁle. But it is also possible to specify patterns including that
basename --- see the explanation of the variable $clean_ext.

In addition to specifying files to be deleted in a clean up, latexmk uses the same
specification to assist its examination of changes in source files: Under some situations it
needs to find those changes in files (since a previous run) that are expected to be due to
the user editing a file. This contrasts with the cases of files that are generated by some
program run by latexmk and that differ from the results of the previous run. This use of
@generated_exts is normally unimportant, given the usual accuracy of latexmk’s other
ways of determining these generated files.

A convenient way to add an extra extension to the list, without losing the already deﬁned
ones is to use a push command in the line in an RC ﬁle. E.g.,

push @generated_exts, "end";

adds the extension "end" to the list of predeﬁned generated extensions. (This extension
is used by the RevTeX package, for example.)

$go_mode [0]
If nonzero, process ﬁles regardless of timestamps, and is then equivalent to the -g
option.

%hash_calc_ignore_pattern
!!!This variable is for experts only!!!

The general rule latexmk uses for determining when an extra run of some program is
needed is that one of the source files has changed. But consider for example a latex
package that causes an encapsulated postscript file (an "eps" file) to be made that is to be
read in on the next run. The file contains a comment line giving its creation date and
time. On the next run the time changes, latex sees that the eps file has changed, and
therefore reruns latex. This causes an infinite loop, that is only terminated because
latexmk has a limit on the number of runs to guard against pathological situations.

But the changing line has no real effect, since it is a comment. You can instruct latex to
ignore the offending line as follows:

$hash_calc_ignore_pattern{’eps’} = ’ˆ%%CreationDate: ’;

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This creates a rule for files with extension .eps about lines to ignore. The left-hand side
is a Perl idiom for setting an item in a hash. Note that the file extension is specified
without a period. The value, on the right-hand side, is a string containing a regular
expression. (See documentation on Perl for how they are to be specified in general.)
This particular regular expression specifies that lines beginning with "%%CreationDate:
" are to be ignored in deciding whether a file of the given extension .eps has changed.

There is only one regular expression available for each extension. If you need more one
pattern to specify lines to ignore, then you need to combine the patterns into a single
regular expression. The simplest method is separate the different simple patterns by a
vertical bar character (indicating "alternation" in the jargon of regular expressions). For
example,

$hash_calc_ignore_pattern{’eps’} = ’ˆ%%CreationDate: |ˆ%%Title: ’;

causes lines starting with either "ˆ%%CreationDate: " or "ˆ%%Title: " to be ignored.

It may happen that a pattern to be ignored is specified in, for example, in a system or
user initialization file, and you wish to remove this in a file that is read later. To do this,
you use Perl’s delete function, e.g.,

delete $hash_calc_ignore_pattern{’eps’};

$hilatex ["hilatex %O %S"]

speciﬁes the command line for the hilatex program.

$hnt_mode [0]
Whether to generate a hnt version of the document by use of hilatex. Can be turned on
by the use of the -hnt option.

$jobname [""]

This specifies the jobname, i.e., the basename that is used for generated files (.aux, .log,
.dvi, .ps, .pdf, etc). If this variable is a null string, then the basename is the basename of
the main tex file. (At present, the string in $jobname should not contain spaces.)

The placeholder ’%A’ is permitted. This will be substituted by the basename of the TeX
file. The primary purpose is when a variety of tex files are to be processed, and you
want to use a different jobname for each but one that is distinct for each. Thus if you
wanted to compare compilations of a set of files on different operating systems, with
distinct filenames for all the cases, you could set

$jobname = "%A-$ˆO";

in an initialization ﬁle. (Here $ˆO is a variable provided by perl that contains perl’s
name for the operating system.)

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Suppose you had .tex ﬁles test1.tex and test2.tex. Then when you run

latexmk -pdf *.tex

both ﬁles will be compiled. The .aux, .log, and .pdf ﬁles will have basenames
test1-MSWin32 ante test2-MSWin32 on a MS-Windows system, test1-darwin and
test2-darwin on an OS-X system, and a variety of similar cases on linux systems.

$kpsewhich ["kpsewhich %S"]

The program called to locate a source file when the name alone is not sufficient. Most
filenames used by latexmk have sufficient path information to be found directly. But
sometimes, notably when a .bib or a .bst file is found from the log file of a bibtex or
biber run, only the base name of the file is known, but not its path. The program
specified by $kpsewhich is used to find it.

(For advanced users: Because of the different way in which latexmk uses the command
specified in $kpsewhich, some of the possibilities listed in the FORMAT OF
COMMAND SPECIFICATIONS do not apply. The internal and start keywords are not
available. A simple command specification with possible options and then "%S" is all
that is guaranteed to work. Note that for other commands, "%S" is substituted by a
single source file. In contrast, for $kpsewhich, "%S" may be substituted by a long list of
space-separated filenames, each of which is quoted. The result on STDOUT of running
the command is then piped to latexmk.)

See also the @BIBINPUTS variable for another way that latexmk also uses to try to
locate ﬁles; it applies only in the case of .bib ﬁles.

$kpsewhich_show [0]
Whether to show diagnostics about invocations of kpsewhich: the command line use to
invoke it and the results. These diagnostics are shown if $kpsewhich_show is non-zero
or if diagnostics mode is on. (But in the second case, lots of other diagnostics are also
shown.) Without these diagnostics there is nothing visible in latexmk’s screen output
about invocations of kpsewhich.

$landscape_mode [0]
If nonzero, run in landscape mode, using the landscape mode previewers and dvi to
postscript converters. Equivalent to the -l option. Normally not needed with current
previewers.

$latex ["latex %O %S"]

Speciﬁes the command line for the LaTeX processing program. Note that as with other
programs, you can use this variable not just to change the name of the program used, but
also specify options to the program. E.g.,

$latex = "latex --src-specials %O %S";

To do a coordinated setting of all of $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex,

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and $xelatex, see the section "Advanced Conﬁguration".

%latex_input_extensions
This variable specifies the extensions tried by latexmk when it finds that a LaTeX run
resulted in an error that a file has not been found, and the file is given without an
extension. This typically happens when LaTeX commands of the form \input{file} or
\includegraphics{figure}, when the relevant source file does not exist.

In this situation, latexmk searches for custom dependencies to make the missing ﬁle(s),
but restricts it to the extensions speciﬁed by the variable %latex_input_extensions. The
default extensions are ’tex’ and ’eps’.

(For Perl experts: %latex_input_extensions is a hash whose keys are the extensions. The
values are irrelevant.) Two subroutines are provided for manipulating this and the
related variable %pdﬂatex_input_extensions, add_input_ext and remove_input_ext.
They are used as in the following examples are possible lines in an initialization ﬁle:

remove_input_ext( ’latex’, ’tex’ );

removes the extension ’tex’ from latex_input_extensions

add_input_ext( ’latex’, ’asdf’ );

add the extension ’asdf to latex_input_extensions. (Naturally with such an extension,

you should have made an appropriate custom dependency for latexmk, and should also
have done the appropriate programming in the LaTeX source ﬁle to enable the ﬁle to be
read. The standard extensions are handled by LaTeX and its graphics/graphicx
packages.)
$latex_silent_switch ["-interaction=batchmode"]
Switch(es) for the LaTeX processing program when silent mode is on.

If you use MikTeX, you may prefer the results if you conﬁgure the options to include -c-
style-errors, e.g., by the following line in an initialization ﬁle

$latex_silent_switch = "-interaction=batchmode -c-style-errors";

$lpr ["lpr %O %S" under UNIX/Linux, "NONE lpr" under MS-Windows]

The command to print postscript ﬁles.

Under MS-Windows (unlike UNIX/Linux), there is no standard program for printing

ﬁles. But there are ways you can do it. For example, if you have gsview installed, you
could use it with the option "/p":

$lpr = ’"c:/Program Files/Ghostgum/gsview/gsview32.exe" /p’;

If gsview is installed in a different directory, you will need to make the appropriate
change. Note the combination of single and double quotes around the name. The single

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quotes specify that this is a string to be assigned to the configuration variable $lpr. The
double quotes are part of the string passed to the operating system to get the command
obeyed; this is necessary because one part of the command name ("Program Files")
contains a space which would otherwise be misinterpreted.
$lpr_dvi ["NONE lpr_dvi"]
The printing program to print dvi files.
$lpr_pdf ["NONE lpr_pdf"]
The printing program to print pdf files.

Under MS-Windows you could set this to use gsview, if it is installed, e.g.,

$lpr = ’"c:/Program Files/Ghostgum/gsview/gsview32.exe" /p’;

If gsview is installed in a different directory, you will need to make the appropriate
change. Note the double quotes around the name: this is necessary because one part of
the command name ("Program Files") contains a space which would otherwise be
misinterpreted.
$lualatex ["lualatex %O %S"]
Speciﬁes the command line for the LaTeX processing program that is to be used when
the lualatex program is called for (e.g., by the option -lualatex.

To do a coordinated setting of all of $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex,

and $xelatex, see the section "Advanced Conﬁguration".

%lualatex_input_extensions
This variable specifies the extensions tried by latexmk when it finds that a lualatex run
resulted in an error that a file has not been found, and the file is given without an
extension. This typically happens when LaTeX commands of the form \input{file} or
\includegraphics{figure}, when the relevant source file does not exist.

In this situation, latexmk searches for custom dependencies to make the missing file(s),
but restricts it to the extensions specified by the variable %pdflatex_input_extensions.
The default extensions are ’tex’, ’pdf’, ’jpg, and ’png’.

See details of the %latex_input_extensions for other information that equally applies to
%lualatex_input_extensions.
$lualatex_silent_switch ["-interaction=batchmode"]
Switch(es) for the lualatex program (speciﬁed in the variable $lualatex) when silent
mode is on.

See details of the $latex_silent_switch for other information that equally applies to
$lualatex_silent_switch.
$make ["make"]
The make processing program.

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$makeindex ["makeindex %O -o %D %S"]

The index processing program.
$makeindex_fudge [0]
When using makeindex, whether to change directory to $aux_dir before running
makeindex. Set to 1 if $aux_dir is not an explicit subdirectory of current directory,
otherwise makeindex will refuse to write its output and log ﬁles, for security reasons.
$makeindex_silent_switch ["-q"]
Switch(es) for the index processing program when silent mode is on.
$max_repeat [5]
The maximum number of times latexmk will run *latex before deciding that there may
be an inﬁnite loop and that it needs to bail out, rather than rerunning *latex again to
resolve cross-references, etc. The default value covers all normal cases.

(Note that the "etc" covers a lot of cases where one run of *latex generates ﬁles to be
read in on a later run.)
$MSWin_back_slash [1]
This conﬁguration variable only has an effect when latexmk is running under MS-
Windows. With the default value of 1 for this variable, when a command is executed
under MS-Windows, latexmk substitutes "\" for the separator character between
components of a directory name. Internally, latexmk uses "/" for the directory separator
character, which is the character used by Unix-like systems.

For almost all programs and for almost all ﬁlenames under MS-Windows, both "\" and
"/" are acceptable as the directory separator character, provided at least that ﬁlenames
are properly quoted. But it is possible that programs exist that only accept "\" on the
command line, since that is the standard directory separator for MS-Windows. So for
safety latexmk makes the substitution from "/" to "\", by default.

However there are also programs on MS-Windows for which a back slash "\" is
interpreted differently than as a directory separator; for these the directory separator
should be "/". Programs with this behavior include all the *latex programs in the
TeXLive implementation (but not the MiKTeX implementation). Hence if you use
TeXLive on MS-Windows, then $MSWin_back_slash should be set to zero.

$new_viewer_always [0]
This variable applies to latexmk only in continuous-preview mode. If
$new_viewer_always is 0, latexmk will check for a previously running previewer on the
same ﬁle, and if one is running will not start a new one. If $new_viewer_always is non-
zero, this check will be skipped, and latexmk will behave as if no viewer is running.

$out_dir [""]
If non-blank, this variable speciﬁes the output directory.

This is the directory in which the main output ﬁles are written (dvi, ps, pdf, synctex,
synctex.gz). In addition, if the aux directory equals the output directory, as is the case
by default, then other generated ﬁles are in effect written to the output directory.

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If $out_dir is blank, the output directory is the current directory at the invocation of
*latex; this is equivalent to setting $out_dir to ’.’.

See the section AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES for more details.

$out2_dir [""]
(Experimental new feature.)

If non-blank, this variable specifies the final-output directory, i.e., the directory for the
final output files. If this variable is blank (its default value), the final-output directory is
the same as the output directory.

See the description of the option -out2dir for an explanation of the rationale for the idea
of separate output and ﬁnal-output directories.

If the final-output directory is different from the output directory, then after a full round
of compilations of the document, the relevant set of files is copied here from the output
directory. The files copied are specified by the @out2_exts variable, and by default are
those with extensions ’hnt’, ’pdf’, ’ps’, ’synctex’, ’synctex.gz’, and a basename the same
as for the main *latex compilation.

@out2_exts [( ’hnt’, ’pdf’, ’ps’, ’synctex’, ’synctex.gz’ )]

This variable lists the extensions of the files to be copied to the final-output directory.
The basename of the files is that for the main *latex compilation (corresponding to the
value specified by the placeholder %R). More general names may be specified in the
same way as for the @generated_exts variable, by inclusion of %R in a pattern, e.g.,

push @out2_exts, ’%R-2up.pdf’;

$pdf_mode [0]
If zero, do NOT generate a pdf version of the document. If equal to 1, generate a pdf
version of the document using pdflatex, using the command specified by the $pdflatex
variable. If equal to 2, generate a pdf version of the document from the ps file, by using
the command specified by the $ps2pdf variable. If equal to 3, generate a pdf version of
the document from the dvi file, by using the command specified by the $dvipdf variable.
If equal to 4, generate a pdf version of the document using lualatex, using the command
specified by the $lualatex variable. If equal to 5, generate a pdf version (and an xdv
version) of the document using xelatex, using the commands specified by the $xelatex
and xdvipdfmx variables.

In $pdf_mode=2, it is ensured that .dvi and .ps ﬁles are also made. In $pdf_mode=3, it is
ensured that a .dvi ﬁle is also made. But this may be overridden by the document.

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$pdﬂatex ["pdﬂatex %O %S"]

Specifies the command line for the LaTeX processing program in a version that makes a
pdf file instead of a dvi file.

An example use of this variable is to add certain options to the command line for the
program, e.g.,

$pdﬂatex = "pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S";

(In some earlier versions of latexmk, you needed to use an assignment to $pdflatex to
allow the use of lualatex or xelatex instead of pdflatex. There are now separate
configuration variables for the use of lualatex or xelatex. See $lualatex and $xelatex.)

To do a coordinated setting of all of $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex,

and $xelatex, see the section "Advanced Conﬁguration".

%pdflatex_input_extensions
This variable specifies the extensions tried by latexmk when it finds that a pdflatex run
resulted in an error that a file has not been found, and the file is given without an
extension. This typically happens when LaTeX commands of the form \input{file} or
\includegraphics{figure}, when the relevant source file does not exist.

See details of the %latex_input_extensions for other information that equally applies to
%pdflatex_input_extensions.
$pdflatex_silent_switch ["-interaction=batchmode"]
Switch(es) for the pdflatex program (specified in the variable $pdflatex) when silent
mode is on.

See details of the $latex_silent_switch for other information that equally applies to
$pdﬂatex_silent_switch.
$pdf_previewer ["start acroread %O %S"]
The command to invoke a pdf-previewer.

On MS-Windows, the default is changed to "cmd /c start """; under more recent versions
of Windows, this will cause to be run whatever command the system has associated with
.pdf ﬁles. But this may be undesirable if this association is to acroread -- see the notes
in the explanation of the -pvc option.]

On OS-X the default is changed to "open %S", which results in OS-X starting up (and
detaching) the viewer associated with the ﬁle. By default, for pdf ﬁles this association is
to OS-X’s preview, which is quite satisfactory.

WARNING: Problem under MS-Windows: if acroread is used as the pdf previewer, and

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it is actually viewing a pdf file, the pdf file cannot be updated. Thus makes acroread a
bad choice of previewer if you use latexmk’s previous-continuous mode (option -pvc)
under MS-windows. This problem does not occur if, for example, SumatraPDF or
gsview is used to view pdf files.

Important note: Normally you will want to have a previewer run detached, so that
latexmk doesn’t wait for the previewer to terminate before continuing its work. So
normally you should prefix the command by "start ", which flags to latexmk that it
should do the detaching of the previewer itself (by whatever method is appropriate to the
operating system). But sometimes letting latexmk do the detaching is not appropriate
(for a variety of non-trivial reasons), so you should put the "start " bit in yourself,
whenever it is needed.
$pdf_update_command [""]
When the pdf previewer is set to be updated by running a command, this is the
command that is run. See the information for the variable $pdf_update_method.
$pdf_update_method [1 under UNIX, 3 under MS-Windows]
How the pdf viewer updates its display when the pdf file has changed. See the
information on the variable $dvi_update_method for the codes. (Note that information
needs be changed slightly so that for the value 4, to run a command to do the update, the
command is specified by the variable $pdf_update_command, and for the value 2, to
specify update by signal, the signal is specified by $pdf_update_signal.)

Note that acroread under MS-Windows (but not UNIX) locks the pdf ﬁle, so the default
value is then 3.

Arranging to use a command to get a previewer explicitly updated requires three

variables to be set. For example:

$pdf_previewer = "start xpdf -remote %R %O %S";

$pdf_update_method = 4;
$pdf_update_command = "xpdf -remote %R -reload";

The first setting arranges for the xpdf program to be used in its "remote server mode",
with the server name specified as the rootname of the TeX file. The second setting
arranges for updating to be done in response to a command, and the third setting sets the
update command.
$pdf_update_signal [Under UNIX: SIGHUP, which is a system-dependent value]
The number of the signal that is sent to the pdf viewer when it is updated by sending a
signal -- see the information on the variable $pdf_update_method. The default value is
the one appropriate for gv on a UNIX system.
$pid_position[1 under UNIX, -1 under MS-Windows]
The variable $pid_position is used to specify which word in lines of the output from
$pscmd corresponds to the process ID. The first word in the line is numbered 0. The
default value of 1 (2nd word in line) is correct for Solaris 2.6, Linux, and OS-X with
their default settings of $pscmd.

Setting the variable to -1 is used to indicate that $pscmd is not to be used.

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$postscript_mode [0]
If nonzero, generate a postscript version of the document. Equivalent to the -ps option.

If some other request is made for which a postscript ﬁle is needed, then
$postscript_mode will be set to 1.
$pre_tex_code [’’]

Sets TeX code to be executed before inputting the source ﬁle. This works if the relevant
one of $latex, etc contains a suitable command line with a %P or %U substitution. For
example you could do

$latex = ’latex %O %P’;

$pre_tex_code = ’\AtBeginDocument{An initial message\par}’;

To set all of $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex, and $xelatex you could use the subroutine
alt_tex_cmds:

&alt_tex_cmds;
$pre_tex_code = ’\AtBeginDocument{An initial message\par}’;

$preview_continuous_mode [0]
If nonzero, run a previewer to view the document, and continue running latexmk to keep
.dvi up-to-date. Equivalent to the -pvc option. Which previewer is run depends on the
other settings, see the command line options -view=, and the variable $view.
$preview_mode [0]
If nonzero, run a previewer to preview the document. Equivalent to the -pv option.
Which previewer is run depends on the other settings, see the command line options
-view=, and the variable $view.
$printout_mode [0]
If nonzero, print the document using the command specified in the $lpr variable.
Equivalent to the -p option. This is recommended not to be set from an RC file,
otherwise you could waste lots of paper.
$print_type = ["auto"]
Type of file to printout: possibilities are "auto", "dvi", "none", "pdf", or "ps". See the
option -print= for the meaning of the "auto" value.
$pscmd
Command used to get all the processes currently run by the user. The -pvc option uses
the command specified by the variable $pscmd to determine if there is an already
running previewer, and to find the process ID (needed if latexmk needs to signal the
previewer about file changes).

Each line of the output of this command is assumed to correspond to one process. See
the $pid_position variable for how the process number is determined.

The default for pscmd is "NONE" under MS-Windows and cygwin (i.e., the command is

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not used), "ps -ww -u $ENV{USER}" under OS-X, and "ps -f -u $ENV{USER}" under
other operating systems (including Linux). In these specifications "$ENV{USER}" is
substituted by the username.
$ps2pdf ["ps2pdf -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY %O %S %D"]
Command to convert .ps to .pdf file.
$ps_filter [empty]
The postscript file filter to be run on the newly produced postscript file before other
processing. Equivalent to specifying the -pF option.
$ps_previewer ["start gv %O %S", but start %O %S under MS-Windows]
The command to invoke a ps-previewer. (The default under MS-Windows will cause to
be run whatever command the system has associated with .ps files.)

Note that gv could be used with the -watch option updates its display whenever the
postscript ﬁle changes, whereas ghostview does not. However, different versions of gv
have slightly different ways of writing this option. You can conﬁgure this variable
appropriately.

WARNING: Linux systems may have installed one (or more) versions of gv under
different names, e.g., ggv, kghostview, etc, but perhaps not one actually called gv.

$ps_previewer_landscape ["start gv -swap %O %S", but start %O %S under MS-

Windows]
The command to invoke a ps-previewer in landscape mode.
$ps_update_command [""]
When the postscript previewer is set to be updated by running a command, this is the
command that is run. See the information for the variable $ps_update_method.
$ps_update_method [0 under UNIX, 1 under MS-Windows]
How the postscript viewer updates its display when the .ps file has changed. See the
information on the variable $dvi_update_method for the codes. (Note that information
needs be changed slightly so that for the value 4, to run a command to do the update, the
command is specified by the variable $ps_update_command, and for the value 2, to
specify update by signal, the signal is specified by $ps_update_signal.)
$ps_update_signal [Under UNIX: SIGHUP, which is a system-dependent value]
The number of the signal that is sent to the pdf viewer when it is updated by sending a
signal -- see $ps_update_method. The default value is the one appropriate for gv on a
UNIX system.

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$pvc_timeout [0]
If this variable is nonzero, there will be a timeout in pvc mode after a period of
inactivity. Inactivity means a period when latexmk has detected no ﬁle changes and
hence has not taken any actions like compiling the document. The period of inactivity is
in the variable $pvc_timeout_mins.

$pvc_timeout_mins [30]
The period of inactivity, in minutes, after which pvc mode times out. This is used if
$pvc_timeout is nonzero.
$pvc_view_file_via_temporary [1]
The same as $always_view_file_via_temporary, except that it only applies in preview-
continuous mode (-pvc option).
$quote_filenames [1]
This specifies whether substitutions for placeholders in command specifications (as in
$pdflatex) are surrounded by double quotes. If this variable is 1 (or any other value Perl
regards as true), then quoting is done. Otherwise quoting is omitted.

The quoting method used by latexmk is tested to work correctly under UNIX systems
(including Linux and Mac OS-X) and under MS-Windows. It allows the use of
filenames containing special characters, notably spaces. (But note that many versions of
*latex cannot correctly deal with TeX files whose names contain spaces. Latexmk’s
quoting only ensures that such filenames are correctly treated by the operating system in
passing arguments to programs.)
$rc_report [1]
After initialization, whether to give a list of the RC files read.
$recorder [1]
Whether to use the -recorder option to *latex. Use of this option results in a file of
extension .fls containing a list of the files that these programs have read and written.
Latexmk will then use this file to improve its detection of source files and generated files
after a run of *latex.

It is generally recommended to use this option (or to conﬁgure the $recorder variable to
be on.) But it only works if *latex supports the -recorder option, which is true for most
current implementations

Note about the name of the .fls file: Most implementations of *latex produce an .fls file
with the same basename as the main document’s LaTeX, e.g., for Document.tex, the .fls
file is Document.fls. However, some implementations instead produce files named for
the program, i.e., latex.fls or pdflatex.fls. In this second case, latexmk copies the latex.fls
or pdflatex.fls to a file with the basename of the main LaTeX document, e.g.,
Document.fls.
$search_path_separator [See below for default]
The character separating paths in the environment variables TEXINPUTS, BIBINPUTS,
and BSTINPUTS. This variable is mainly used by latexmk when the -outdir, -output-
directory, -auxdir, and/or -aux-directory options are used. In that case latexmk needs
to communicate appropriately modified search paths to bibtex, dvipdf, dvips, and *latex.

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[Comment to technically savvy readers: *latex doesn’t actually need the modiﬁed search
path. But, surprisingly, dvipdf and dvips do, because sometimes graphics ﬁles get
generated in the output or aux directories.]

The default under MSWin and Cygwin is ’;’ and under UNIX-like operating systems
(including Linux and OS-X) is ’:’. Normally the defaults give correct behavior. But
there can be difﬁculties if your operating system is of one kind, but some of your
software is running under an emulator for the other kind of operating system; in that
case you’ll need to ﬁnd out what is needed, and set $search_path_separator explicitly.
(The same goes, of course, for unusual operating systems that are not in the MSWin,
Linux, OS-X, Unix collection.)
$show_time [0]
Whether to show time used, both the total and for individual steps.

Note: On MS Windows, this is clock time. On other OSs it is the CPU time used (by
latexmk and the child processes it invokes). The OS-dependence is because of a
limitation of Windows. If you wish to force the use of clock instead of CPU time, you
can set

$times_are_clock = 1;

$silence_logfile_warnings [0]
Whether after a run of *latex to summarize warnings in the log file about undefined
citations and references. Setting $silence_logfile_warnings=0 gives the summary of
warnings (provided silent mode isn’t also set), and this is useful to locate undefined
citations and references without searching through the much more verbose log file or the
screen output of *latex. But the summary can also be excessively annoying. The
default is not to give these warnings. The command line options
-silence_logfile_warning_list and -silence_logfile_warning_list- also set this variable.

Note that multiple occurrences for the same undeﬁned object on the same page and
same line will be compressed to a single warning.

$silent [0]
Whether to run silently. Setting $silent to 1 has the same effect as the -quiet of -silent
options on the command line.

$sleep_time [2]
The time to sleep (in seconds) between checking for source-ﬁle changes when running
with the -pvc option. If non-zero, it is subject to a minimum value give by the
$min_sleep_time variable. But a zero value is also allowed.

A value of exactly 0 gives no delay between checks for source-ﬁle changes; it typically
results in 100% CPU usage, which may not be desirable.

In old versions of latexmk, the default value of $sleep_time of 2 was set to give a

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B-pvc mode and the amount of CPU

reasonable compromise between responsiveness in
usage. On modern computers with fast multi-core CPUs, a smaller value, e.g., 0.1 can
give good results, especially when working with small documents whose compilation
may take well under a second.

$texﬁle_search [""]
This is an obsolete variable, replaced by the @default_ﬁles variable.

For backward compatibility, if you choose to set $texﬁle_search, it is a string of space-

separated filenames, and then latexmk replaces @default_files with the filenames in
$texfile_search to which is added "*.tex".
$success_cmd [undefined]
See the documentation for $compiling_cmd.
$tmpdir [See below for default]
Directory to store temporary files that latexmk may generate while running.

The default under MSWindows (including cygwin), is to set $tmpdir to the value of the
ﬁrst of whichever of the system environment variables TMPDIR or TEMP exists,
otherwise to the current directory. Under other operating systems (expected to be
UNIX/Linux, including OS-X), the default is the value of the system environment
variable TMPDIR if it exists, otherwise "/tmp".

$use_make_for_missing_ﬁles [0]
Whether to use make to try and make ﬁles that are missing after a run of *latex, and for
which a custom dependency has not been found. This is generally useful only when
latexmk is used as part of a bigger project which is built by using the make program.

Note that once a missing file has been made, no further calls to make will be made on a
subsequent run of latexmk to update the file. Handling this problem is the job of a
suitably defined Makefile. See the section "USING latexmk WITH make" for how to do
this. The intent of calling make from latexmk is merely to detect dependencies.

$user_deleted_file_treated_as_changed [0]
Whether when testing for changed files, a user file that changes status from existing to
non-existing should be regarded as changed.

The default value is 0, which implies that if a user ﬁle (as opposed to a generated ﬁle)
has been deleted since the previous run, then no recompilation should be done. The
reasoning is that a rerun would simply produce an error.

If the value is 1, then disappearance of a user ﬁle is treated as triggering a rerun, but
only in non-preview-continuous mode.

If the value is 2, then disappearance of a user ﬁle is treated as triggering a rerun, always.

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$view ["default"]
Which kind of ﬁle is to be previewed if a previewer is used. The possible values are
"default", "dvi", "hnt", "ps", "pdf", "none". The value of "default" means that the
"highest" of the kinds of ﬁle generated is to be used (among .dvi, .hnt, .ps and .pdf).

$warnings_as_errors [0]
Normally latexmk copies the behavior of latex in treating undefined references and
citations and multiply defined references as conditions that give a warning but not an
error. The variable $warnings_as_errors controls whether this behavior is modified.

When the variable is non-zero, latexmk at the end of its run will return a non-zero status
code to the operating system if any of the files processed gives a warning about
problems with citations or references (i.e., undefined citations or references or multiply
defined references). This is after latexmk has completed all the runs it needs to try and
resolve references and citations. Thus $warnings_as_errors being nonzero causes
latexmk to treat such warnings as errors, but only when they occur on the last run of
*latex and only after processing is complete. A non-zero value $warnings_as_errors
can be set by the command-line option -Werror.

The default behavior is normally satisfactory in the usual edit-compile-edit cycle. But,
for example, latexmk can also be used as part of a build process for some bigger project,
e.g., for creating documentation in the build of a software application. Then it is often
sensible to treat citation and reference warnings as errors that require the overall build
process to be aborted. Of course, since multiple runs of *latex are generally needed to
resolve references and citations, what matters is not the warnings on the ﬁrst run, but the
warnings on the last run; latexmk takes this into account appropriately.

In addition, when preview-continuous mode is used, a non-zero value for

$warnings_as_errors changes the use of the commands $failure_cmd, $warning_cmd,
and $success_cmd after a compliation. If there are citation or reference warnings, but no
other errors, the behavior is as follows. If $warning_cmd is set, it is used. If it is not set,
then then if $warnings_as_errors is non-zero and $failure_cmd is set, then
$failure_cmd. Otherwise $success_cmd is used, if it is set. (The foregoing explanation
is rather complicated, because latexmk has to deal with the case that one or more of the
commands isn’t set.)

$xdv_mode [0]
If one, generate an xdv version of the document by use of xelatex.

$xdvipdfmx ["xdvipdfmx -E -o %D %O %S"]

The program to make a pdf ﬁle from an xdv ﬁle (used in conjunction with xelatex when
$pdf_mode=5).
$xdvipdfmx_silent_switch ["-q"]
Switch(es) for the xdvipdfmx program when silent mode is on.

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$xelatex ["xelatex %O %S"]

Speciﬁes the command line for the LaTeX processing program of when the xelatex
program is called for. See the documentation of the -xelatex option for some special
properties of latexmk’s use of xelatex.

Note about xelatex: latexmk uses xelatex to make an .xdv rather than .pdf file, with the
.pdf file being created in a separate step. This is enforced by the use of the -no-pdf
option. If %O is part of the command for invoking xelatex, then latexmk will insert the
-no-pdf option automatically, otherwise you must provide the option yourself. See the
documentation for the -pdfxe option for why latexmk makes a .xdv file rather than a .pdf
file when xelatex is used.

To do a coordinated setting of all of $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex,

and $xelatex, see the section "Advanced Conﬁguration".

%xelatex_input_extensions
This variable specifies the extensions tried by latexmk when it finds that an xelatex run
resulted in an error that a file has not been found, and the file is given without an
extension. This typically happens when LaTeX commands of the form \input{file} or
\includegraphics{figure}, when the relevant source file does not exist.

In this situation, latexmk searches for custom dependencies to make the missing ﬁle(s),
but restricts it to the extensions speciﬁed by the variable %xelatex_input_extensions.
The default extensions are ’tex’, ’pdf’, ’jpg, and ’png’.

See details of the %latex_input_extensions for other information that equally applies to
%xelatex_input_extensions.
$xelatex_silent_switch ["-interaction=batchmode"]
Switch(es) for the xelatex program (speciﬁed in the variable $xelatex) when silent mode
is on.

See details of the $latex_silent_switch for other information that equally applies to
$xelatex_silent_switch.

CUSTOM DEPENDENCIES
In any RC file a set of custom dependencies can be set up to convert a file with one extension to a
file with another. An example use of this would be to allow latexmk to convert a .fig file to .eps to
be included in the .tex file.

Deﬁning a custom dependency:

The old method of configuring latexmk to use a custom dependency was to directly manipulate
the @cus_dep_list array that contains information defining the custom dependencies. (See the
section "Old Method of Defining Custom Dependencies" for details.) This method still works,
but is no longer preferred.

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A better method is to use the subroutines that allow convenient manipulations of the custom
dependency list. These are

add_cus_dep( fromextension, toextension, must, subroutine )

remove_cus_dep( fromextension, toextension )
show_cus_dep()

The arguments are as follows:

from extension:
The extension of the file we are converting from (e.g. "fig"). It is specified without a
period.
to extension:
The extension of the file we are converting to (e.g. "eps"). It is specified without a
period.
must: If non-zero, the file from which we are converting must exist, if it doesn’t exist latexmk
will give an error message and exit unless the -f option is specified. If must is zero and
the file we are converting from doesn’t exist, then no action is taken. Generally, the
appropriate value of must is zero.
function:
The name of the subroutine that latexmk should call to perform the file conversion. The
first argument to the subroutine is the base name of the file to be converted without any
extension. The subroutines are declared in the syntax of Perl. The function should
return 0 if it was successful and a nonzero number if it failed.

Naturally add_cus_dep adds a custom dependency with the specified from and to extensions. If a
custom dependency has been previously defined (e.g., in an rcfile that was read earlier), then it is
replaced by the new one.

The subroutine remove_cus_dep removes the speciﬁed custom dependency. The subroutine
show_cus_dep causes a list of the currently deﬁned custom dependencies to be sent to the screen
output.

How custom dependencies are used:

An instance of a custom dependency rule is created whenever latexmk detects that a run of *latex
needs to read a file, like a graphics file, whose extension is the to-extension of a custom
dependency. Then latexmk examines whether a file exists with the same name, but with the
corresponding from-extension, as specified in the custom-dependency. If it does, then a
corresponding instance of the custom dependency is created, after which the rule is invoked
whenever the destination file (the one with the to-extension) is out-of-date with respect to the
corresponding source file.

To make the new destination file, the Perl subroutine specified in the rule is invoked, with an
argument that is the base name of the files in question. Simple cases just involve a subroutine
invoking an external program; this can be done by following the templates below, even by those
without knowledge of the Perl programming language. Of course, experts could do something
much more elaborate.

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One item in the specification of each custom-dependency rule, labeled "must" above, specifies
how the rule should be applied when the source file fails to exist.

When latex reports that an input file (e.g., a graphics file) does not exist, latexmk tries to find a
source file and a custom dependency that can be used to make it. If it succeeds, then it creates an
instance of the custom dependency and invokes it to make the missing file, after which the next
pass of latex etc will be able to read the newly created file.

Note for advanced usage: The operating system’s environment variable TEXINPUTS can be used
to specify a search path for finding files by latex etc. Correspondingly, when a missing file is
reported, latexmk looks in the directories specified in TEXINPUTS as well as in the current
directory, to find a source file from which an instance of a custom dependency can be used to
make the missing file.

Function to implement custom dependency, traditional method:

The function that implements a custom dependency gets the information on the files to be
processed in two ways. The first is through its one argument; the argument contains the base
name of the source and destination files. The second way is described later.

A simple and typical example of code in an initialization rcﬁle using the ﬁrst method is:

add_cus_dep( ’ﬁg’, ’eps’, 0, ’ﬁg2eps’ );

sub fig2eps {
system( "fig2dev -Leps \"$_[0].fig\" \"$_[0].eps\"" );
}

The first line adds a custom dependency that converts a file with extension "fig", as created by the
xfig program, to an encapsulated postscript file, with extension "eps". The remaining lines define
a subroutine that carries out the conversion. If a rule for converting "fig" to "eps" files already
exists (e.g., from a previously read-in initialization file), the latexmk will delete this rule before
making the new one.

Suppose latexmk is using this rule to convert a file "figure.fig" to "figure.eps". Then it will invoke
the fig2eps subroutine defined in the above code with a single argument "figure", which is the
basename of each of the files (possibly with a path component). This argument is referred to by
Perl as $_[0]. In the example above, the subroutine uses the Perl command system to invoke the
program fig2dev. The double quotes around the string are a Perl idiom that signify that each
string of the form of a variable name, $_[0] in this case, is to be substituted by its value.

If the return value of the subroutine is non-zero, then latexmk will assume an error occurred
during the execution of the subroutine. In the above example, no explicit return value is given,
and instead the return value is the value returned by the last (and only) statement, i.e., the
invocation of system, which returns the value 0 on success.

If you use pdflatex, lualatex or xelatex instead of latex, then you will probably prefer to convert
your graphics files to pdf format, in which case you would replace the above code in an
initialization file by

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add_cus_dep( ’ﬁg’, ’pdf, 0, ’ﬁg2pdf’ );

sub fig2pdf {
system( "fig2dev -Lpdf \"$_[0].fig\" \"$_[0].pdf\"" );
}

Note 1: In the command lines given in the system commands in the above examples, double
quotes have been inserted around the ﬁle names (implemented by ’\"’ in the Perl language). They
immunize the running of the program against special characters in ﬁlenames. Very often these
quotes are not necessary, i.e., they can be omitted. But it is normally safer to keep them in. Even
though the rules for quoting vary between operating systems, command shells and individual
pieces of software, the quotes in the above examples do not cause problems in the cases I have
tested.

Note 2: One case in which the quotes are important is when the files are in a subdirectory and
your operating system is Microsoft Windows. Then the separator character for directory
components can be either a forward slash ’/’ or Microsoft’s more usual backward slash ’\’.
Forward slashes are generated by latexmk, to maintain its sanity from software like MiKTeX that
mixes both directory separators; but their correct use normally requires quoted filenames. (See a
log file from a run of MiKTeX (at least in v. 2.9) for an example of the use of both directory
separators.)

Note 3: The subroutines implementing custom dependencies in the examples given just have a
single line invoking an external program. That’s the usual situation. But since the subroutines
are in the Perl language, you can implement much more complicated processing if you need it.

Removing custom dependencies, and when you might need to do this:

If you have some general custom dependencies defined in the system or user initialization file,
you may find that for a particular project they are undesirable. So you might want to delete the
unneeded ones. A situation where this would be desirable is where there are multiple custom
dependencies with the same from-extension or the same to-extension. In that case, latexmk might
choose a different one from the one you want for a specific project. As an example, to remove
any "fig" to "eps" rule you would use:

remove_cus_dep( ’ﬁg’, ’eps’ );

If you have complicated sets of custom dependencies, you may want to get a listing of the custom
dependencies. This is done by using the line

show_cus_dep();

in an initialization ﬁle.

Function implementing custom dependency, alternative methods:

So far the examples for functions to implement custom dependencies have used the argument of
the function to specify the base name of converted ﬁle. This method has been available since
very old versions of latexmk, and many examples can be found, e.g., on the web.

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However in later versions of latexmk the internal structure of the implementation of its "rules" for
the steps of processing, including custom dependencies, became much more powerful. The
function implementing a custom dependency is executed within a special context where a number
of extra variables and subroutines are deﬁned. Publicly documented ones, intended to be long-
term stable, are listed below, under the heading "Variables and subroutines for processing a rule".

Examples of their use is given in the following examples, concerning multiple index ﬁles and
glossaries.

The only index-file conversion built-in to latexmk is from an ".idx" file written on one run of
*latex to an ".ind" file to be read in on a subsequent run. But with the index.sty package, for
example, you can create extra indexes with extensions that you configure. Latexmk does not
know how to deduce the extensions from the information it has. But you can easily write a
custom dependency. For example if your latex file uses the command
"\newindex{special}{ndx}{nnd}{Special index}" you will need to get latexmk to convert files
with the extension .ndx to .nnd. The most elementary method is to define a custom dependency
as follows:

add_cus_dep( ’ndx’, ’nnd’, 0, ’ndx2nnd’ );

sub ndx2nnd {
return system( "makeindex -o \"$_[0].nnd\" \"$_[0].ndx\"" );
}
push @generated_exts, ’ndx’, ’nnd’;

Notice the added line compared with earlier examples. The extra line gets the extensions "ndx"
and "nnd" added to the list of extensions for generated ﬁles; then the extra index ﬁles will be
deleted by clean-up operations

But if you have yet more indexes with yet different extensions, e.g., "adx" and "and", then you
will need a separate function for each pair of extensions. This is quite annoying. You can use the
Run_subst function to simplify the deﬁnitions to use a single function:

add_cus_dep( ’ndx’, ’nnd’, 0, ’dx2nd’ );

add_cus_dep( ’adx’, ’and’, 0, ’dx2nd’ );
sub dx2nd {
return Run_subst( "makeindex -o %D %S" );
}
push @generated_exts, ’ndx’, ’nnd’, ’adx’, ’and’;

You could also instead use

add_cus_dep( ’ndx’, ’nnd’, 0, ’dx2nd’ );

add_cus_dep( ’adx’, ’and’, 0, ’dx2nd’ );
sub dx2nd {
return Run_subst( $makeindex );
}
push @generated_exts, ’ndx’, ’nnd’, ’adx’, ’and’;

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This last example uses the command speciﬁcation in $makeindex, and so any customization you
have made for the standard index also applies to your extra indexes.

Similar techniques can be applied for glossaries.

Those of you with experience with Makefiles, may get concerned that the .ndx file is written
during a run of *latex and is always later than the .nnd last read in. Thus the .nnd appears to be
perpetually out-of-date. This situation, of circular dependencies, is endemic to latex, and is one
of the issues that latexmk is programmed to overcome. It examines the contents of the files (by
use of a checksum), and only does a remake when the file contents have actually changed.

Of course if you choose to write random data to the .nnd (or the .aux ﬁle, etc) that changes on
each new run, then you will have a problem. For real experts: See the
%hash_calc_ignore_pattern if you have to deal with such problems.

Old Method of Deﬁning Custom Dependencies:

In much older versions of latexmk, the only method of defining custom dependencies was to
directly manipulate the table of custom dependencies. This is contained in the @cus_dep_list
array. It is an array of strings, and each string in the array has four items in it, each separated by
a space, the from-extension, the to-extension, the "must" item, and the name of the subroutine for
the custom dependency. These were all defined above.
An example of the old method of defining custom dependencies is as follows. It is the code in an
RC file to ensure automatic conversion of .fig files to .eps files:

push @cus_dep_list, "ﬁg eps 0 ﬁg2eps";

sub fig2eps {
return system( "fig2dev -Lps \"$_[0].fig\" \"$_[0].eps\"" );
}

This method still works, and is almost equivalent to the code given earlier that used the
add_cus_dep subroutine. However, the old method doesn’t delete any previous custom-
dependency for the same conversion. So the new method is preferable.

ADVANCED CONFIGURATION: SOME EXTRA RESOURCES AND ADVANCED

TRICKS
For most purposes, simple configuration for latexmk along the lines of the examples given is
sufficient. But sometimes you need something harder. In this section, I indicate some extra
possibilities. Generally to use these, you need to be fluent in the Perl language, since this is what
is used in the rc files.

In this section, I include ﬁrst, a description of a number of variables and subroutines that provide,
among other things, access to latexmk’s internal data structures for handling dependencies. Then
I describe the hook mechanism whereby at certain points in the processing, latexmk can call user-
deﬁned subroutines.

See also the section DEALING WITH ERRORS, PROBLEMS, ETC. See also the examples in

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the directory example_rcﬁles in the latexmk distributions. Even if none of the examples apply to
your case, they may give you useful ideas

Variables and subroutines for processing a rule

A step in the processing is called a rule. One possibility to implement the processing of a rule is
by a Perl subroutine. This is always the case for custom dependencies. Also, for any other rule,
you can use a subroutine by preﬁxing the command speciﬁcation by the word "internal" -- see the
section FORMAT OF COMMAND SPECIFICATIONS.

When you use a subroutine for processing a rule, all the possibilities of Perl programming are
available, of course. In addition, some of latexmk’s internal variables and subroutines are
available. The ones listed below are intended to be available to (advanced) users, and their
specifications will generally have stability under upgrades. Generally, the variables should be
treated as read-only: Changing their values can have bad consequences, since it is liable to mess
up the consistency of what latexmk is doing.
$rule This variable has the name of the rule, as known to latexmk. Note that the exact contents
of this variable for a given rule may be dependent on the version of latexmk
$$Pbase
This gives the basename for the rule. Generally, it determines the names of generated
files. E.g., for a run of *latex, the name of the .log file is the aux directory concatenated
with the basename and then ‘.log’.

For a *latex rule, the basename is without a directory component. For other rules, it
includes the directory component (if any is used).

This (annoying) difference is associated with the different ways in which the commands
invoked by latexmk work when the command line includes a name for a source file that
includes a directory component. For the *latex commands, the directory of the source
file is irrelevant to the directory component the generated files, which instead is
determined by the values in the -aux-directory and/or -output-directory options.

In contrast, many other programs (e.g., biber, bibtex) put their generated ﬁles in the
same directory as the source ﬁle, merely with a changed extension.

Note the double dollar signs: In Perl terms, the variable $Pbase is a reference to a
variable that contains the basename. The second dollar sign derefences the reference to
give the actual value. (A reference is is used rather like a pointer, and the ‘P’ (for
‘pointer’) at the start of the variable name is a convention used in latexmk to indicate
that the variable is a reference variable.)

$$Pdest
This gives the name of the main output ﬁle if any. Note the double dollar signs.

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$$Psource
This gives the name of the primary source ﬁle. Note the double dollar signs.

add_hook( <stack_name>, <subroutine> )

See the section ‘Hooks’ for more details.

This adds the subroutine specified in the second argument to latexmk’s stack of hooks
specified by the stack name. It returns 1 on sucess, and zero otherwise (e.g., if the
specified hook stack doesn’t exist).

The subroutine can be speciﬁed by a reference to the subroutine, as in

add_hook( ’after_xlatex_analysis’, mmz_analyze )

Given that the subroutine mmz_analyze has been deﬁned in the rc ﬁle.

The subroutine can be speciﬁed by a string whose value is the name of the subroutine,
e.g.,

add_hook( ’after_xlatex_analysis’, ’mmz_analyze’ )

In simple cases, the subroutine can be an anonymous subroutine deﬁned in the call to
add_hooks,

add_hook( ’after_main_pdf’, sub{ print "TEST\n"; return 0; } );

Observe that on success, the subroutine should return 0 (like a call to Perl’s system
subroutine), so normally this should be coded explicitly. If a hook subroutine returns a
non-zero value, latexmk treats that as an error condition.

ensure_path( var, values ...)

The ﬁrst parameter is the name of one of the system’s environment variables for search
paths. The remaining parameters are values that should be in the variable. For each of
the value parameters, if it isn’t already in the variable, then it is prepended to the
variable; in that case the environment variable is created if it doesn’t already exist. For
separating values, the character appropriate the the operating system is used -- see the
conﬁguration variable $search_path_separator.

Example:

ensure_path( ’TEXINPUTS’, ’./custom_cls_sty_ﬁles//’ );

(In this example, the trailing ’//’ is documented by TeX systems to mean that *latex
search for ﬁles in the speciﬁed directory and in all subdirectories.)

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Technically ensure_path works by setting Perl’s variable $ENV{var}, where var is the
name of the target variable. The changed value is then passed as an environment
variable to any invoked programs.

pushd( path ), popd()

These subroutines are used when it is needed to temporarily change the working
directory, as in

pushd( ’some_directory’ );
... Processing done with ’some_directory’ as the working directory
popd()

They perform exactly the same function as the commands of the same names in
operating system command shells like bash on Unix, and cmd.exe on the Windows.

rdb_add_generated( ﬁle, ... )

This subroutine is to be used in the context of a rule, that is, from within a subroutine
that is carrying out processing of a rule. Such is the case for the subroutine
implementing a custom dependency, or the subroutine invoked by using the "internal"
keyword in the command speciﬁcation like that in the variable $latex.

Its arguments are a sequence of filenames which are generated during the running of the
rule. The names might arise from an analysis of the results of the run, e.g., in a log file,
or from knowledge of properties of the specific rule. Calling rdb_add_generated with
these filenames ensures that these files are flagged as generated by the rule in latexmk’s
internal data structures. Basically, no action is taken if the files have already been
flagged as generated.

A main purpose of using this subroutine is for the situation when a generated ﬁle is also
the source ﬁle for some rule, so that latexmk can correctly link the dependency
information in its network of rules.

Note: Unlike some other subroutines in this section, there is no argument for a rule for
rdb_add_generated. Instead, the subroutine is to be invoked during the processing of a
rule when latexmk has set up an appropriate context (i.e., appropriate variables). In
contrast, subroutines with a rule argument can be used also outside a rule context.

rdb_ensure_ﬁle( $rule, ﬁle )

This subroutine ensures that the given file is among the source files for the specified
rule. It is typically used when, during the processing of a rule, it is known that a
particular extra file is among the dependencies that latexmk should know, but its default
methods don’t find the dependency. Almost always the first argument is the name of the
rule currently being processed, so it is then appropriate to specify it by $rule.

For examples of its use, see some of the ﬁles in the directory example_rcﬁles of
latexmk’s distribution. Currently the cases that use this subroutine are bib2gls-
latexmkrc, exceltex_latexmkrc and texinfo-latexmkrc. These illustrate typical cases

27 December 2024 71
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

where latexmk’s normal processing fails to detect certain extra source ﬁles.

Note that rdb_ensure_file only has one filename argument, unlike other subroutines in
this section. If you want to apply its action to multiple files, you will need one call to
rdb_ensure_file for each file.

rdb_ensure_ﬁles_here( ﬁle, ... )

Like subroutine rdb_ensure_files, except that (a) it assumes the context is of a rule, and
the files are to be added to the source list for that rule; (b) multiple files are allowed.

rdb_remove_ﬁles( $rule, ﬁle, ... )

This subroutine removes one or more ﬁles from the dependency list for the given rule.

rdb_remove_generated( ﬁle, ... )

This subroutine is to be used in the context of a rule, that is, from within a subroutine
that is carrying out processing of a rule. It performs the opposite action to
rdb_add_generated. Its effect is to ensure that the given ﬁlenames are not listed in
latexmk’s internal data structures as being generated by the rule.

rdb_list_source( $rule )
This subroutine returns the list of source ﬁles (i.e., the dependency list) for the given
rule.

rdb_set_source( $rule, ﬁle, ... )

rdb_set_source( $rule, @ﬁles )

This subroutine sets the dependency list for the given rule to be the specified files. Files
that are already in the list have unchanged information. Files that were not in the list are
added to it. Files in the previous dependency list that are not in the newly specified list
of files are removed from the dependency list.

Run_subst( command_spec )
This subroutine runs the command specified by command_spec. The specification is a
string in the format listed in the section "Format of Command Specifications". An
important action of the Run_subst is to make substitutions of placeholders, e.g., %S and
%D for source and destination files; these get substituted before the command is run. In
addition, the command after substitution is printed to the screen unless latexmk is
running in silent mode.

test_gen_file_time ( <file> )
This subroutine is used in the context of a rule. It returns true or false according to
whether or not a file of the given name both exists and was generated in the latest run of
the rule. If the subroutine returns false, but the file exists, then the file is a leftover from
a previous run.

27 December 2024 72
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

The test for a file being generated on the current run is whether the modification time of
the file is at least as recent as the time that the run of the rule was started. An allowance
for the granularity of the values of modification time on file systems is made. See the
description of the variable $filetime_causality_threshold for details.

In addition, latexmk makes allowance for the possiblity that ﬁles are hosted on a
different computer than that running latexmk and that the system clock times on the two
computers are mismatched. Latexmk automatically detects (and reports) any signiﬁcant
mismatch and corrects for it.

Coordinated Setting of Commands for *latex

To set all of $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $latex, $pdﬂatex, $lualatex, and $xelatex to a common pattern,
you can use one of the following subroutines, std_tex_cmds, alt_tex_cmds, and set_tex_cmds.

To get the standard commands, use

&std_tex_cmds;

This results in $latex = ’latex %O %S’, and similarly for $dvilualatex, $hilatex, $pdflatex,
$lualatex, and $xelatex. Note the ampersand in the invocation; this indicates to Perl that a
subroutine is being called. (The use of this subroutine enables you to override previous
redefinitions of the $latex, etc variables, which might have occurred in an earlier-read rc file.)

To be able to use the string provided by the -pretex option (if any), you can use

&alt_tex_cmds;

This results in $latex = ’latex %O %P’, etc. Again note the ampersand in the invocation; this
indicates to Perl that a subroutine is being called.

A more general way of specifying the variables is using

set_tex_cmds( ’CMD_SPEC’ );

Here CMD_SPEC is the command line without the program name. This results in $latex = ’latex
CMD_SPEC’, and similarly for $pdﬂatex, etc. (An ampersand preceding the subroutine name is
not necessary here, since the parentheses show Perl that a subroutine is being invoked.)

An example that provides the --interaction=batchmode option to the *latex commands would be

set_tex_cmds( ’--interaction=batchmode %O %S’ );

This results in $latex = ’latex --interaction=batchmode %O %S ’, etc. Note that when ’%O’
appears after the added option, as here, options provided on the command line to latexmk can
override the supplied one.

A more general command line can be set up by using the placeholder ’%C’ in CMD_SPEC. The

27 December 2024 73
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

’%C’ is substituted by the basic name of the command, i.e., whichever of ’latex’, ’pdﬂatex’, etc is
appropriate. (More than one occurrence of ’%C’ is allowed.) For example to use the
development/pre-release versions of latex, etc, which have names, ’latex-dev’, ’pdﬂatex-dev’, etc,
you could use

set_tex_cmds( ’%C-dev %O %S’ );

This results in $latex = ’latex-dev %O %S’, etc. (The pre-release programs latex-dev etc are
provided in current distributions of TeXLive and MiKTeX.)

Hooks
Latexmk provides a way to arrange for user-defined subroutines to be called at certain points in
the processing. These can be used to configure appropriate behavior and actions beyond
latexmk’s normal behavior. For a good example of how they can be used to accommodate
latexmk’s behavior to particular packages, see the file memoize_latexmkrc in the example_rcfiles
subdirectory of the latexmk distribution. (In a standard TeXLive installation, that subdirectory is
to be found in texmf-dist/doc/support/latexmk/)

The hook mechanism is complementary to the method of redeﬁning command strings like
$pdﬂatex etc. The two methods have overlapping domains of usefulness.

Note that the hook mechanism is newly made public in v. 4.84 of latexmk. It is subject to change
and improvement as experience is gained.

The hooks are arranged in named hook stacks, and a hook subroutine is added to a given stack by
latexmk’s add_hook subroutine (documented above). The currently available stacks are as
follows, listed in the approximate order in which they are encountered in processing a document:

before_xlatex
The subroutines in this hook stack are called just before a
*latex programs is run.

after_xlatex
The subroutines in this hook stack are called after a *latex programs is
run. Before the subroutines are called, latexmk has done some immediate
postprocessing, e.g., to move the generated pdf ﬁle from the aux
directory to the output directory when $emulate_aux is set to 1.

after_xlatex_analysis
The subroutines in this hook stack are called after latexmk has done its
dependency analysis after a *latex programs is run. Subroutines in this
stack provide a useful way of adding items to the dependency information
associated with particular packages and that latexmk doesn’t
automatically deal with.

27 December 2024 74
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

after_main_pdf
The subroutines in this hook stack are called after one of the rules that
creates the document’s pdf ﬁle. (This covers any of pdﬂatex, lualatex,
dvipdf, ps2pdf, xdvipdfmx.)

cleanup
The subroutines in this hook stack are called whenever latexmk is about
to do a cleanup operation. They can be used, for example, to tailor the
deleted files to the pecularities of particular packages when latexmk’s
general mechanisms for specifying files to be deleted are too inflexible.

These subroutines are called before latexmk does any of its own file
deletion; thus the hook subroutines have access to all the generated
files that give package-specific information.

cleanup_extra_full
The subroutines in this hook stack are called in addition to the ones in
the cleanup stack, whenever a full cleanup operation is to be done (i.e.,
one that includes the pdf, ps etc ﬁles). They are called immediately
after those in the cleanup stack, but still before latexmk does any of
its own ﬁle deletion.

(Any other stacks deﬁned in latexmk.pl but not listed above are to be regarded as experimental
and subject to change.)

Each subroutine should return 0 on success and a non-zero value on failure. This matches the
convention used for running programs, e.g., by Perl’s system subroutine, and the matching
convention used for subroutines for custom dependencies in latexmk.

For most of the hook stacks, the subroutines are called in the context of a rule, with variables like
$rule deﬁned. However, some hook stacks, like the cleanup ones, are called from outside any
rule; and latexmk adjusts the relevant variables to refer to the overall task (i.e., of processing a
particular main .tex ﬁle).

Advanced conﬁguration: Using latexmk with make

This section is targeted only at advanced users who use the make program for complex projects,
as for software development, with the dependencies speciﬁed by a Makeﬁle.

Now the basic task of latexmk is to run the appropriate programs to make a viewable version of a
LaTeX document. However, the usual make program is not suited to this purpose for at least two
reasons. First is that the use of LaTeX involves circular dependencies (e.g., via .aux files), and
these cannot be handled by the standard make program. Second is that in a large document the
set of source files can change quite frequently, particularly with included graphics files; in this
situation keeping a Makefile manually updated is inappropriate and error-prone, especially when
the dependencies can be determined automatically. Latexmk solves both of these problems
robustly.

27 December 2024 75
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

Thus for many standard LaTeX documents latexmk can be used by itself without the make
program. In a complex project it simply needs to be suitably configured. A standard
configuration would be to define custom dependencies to make graphics files from their source
files (e.g., as created by the xfig program). Custom dependencies are latexmk’s equivalent of
pattern rules in Makefiles.

Nevertheless there are projects for which a Makefile is appropriate, and it is useful to know how
to use latexmk from a Makefile. A typical example would be to generate documentation for a
software project. Potentially the interaction with the rest of the rules in the Makefile could be
quite complicated, for example if some of the source files for a LaTeX document are generated
by the project’s software.

In this section, I give a couple of examples of how latexmk can be usefully invoked from a
Makefile. The examples use specific features of current versions of GNU make, which is the
default on both linux and OS-X systems. They may need modifications for other versions of
make.

The simplest method is simply to delegate all the relevant tasks to latexmk, as is suitable for a
straightforward LaTeX document. For this a suitable Makeﬁle is like

.PHONY : FORCE_MAKE
all : try.pdf
%.pdf : %.tex FORCE_MAKE
latexmk -pdf -dvi- -ps- $<

(Note: the last line must be introduced by a tab for the Makefile to function correctly!) Naturally,
if making try.pdf from its associated LaTeX file try.tex were the only task to be performed, a
direct use of latexmk without a Makefile would normally be better. The benefit of using a
Makefile for a LaTeX document would be in a larger project, where lines such as the above
would be only be a small part of a larger Makefile.

The above example has a pattern rule for making a .pdf file from a .tex file, and it is defined to
use latexmk in the obvious way. There is a conventional default target named "all", with a
prerequisite of try.pdf. So when make is invoked, by default it makes try.pdf. The only
complication is that there may be many source files beyond try.tex, but these aren’t specified in
the Makefile, so changes in them will not by themselves cause latexmk to be invoked. Instead,
the pattern rule is equipped with a "phony" prerequisite FORCE_MAKE; this has the effect of
causing the rule to be always out-of-date, so that latexmk is always run. It is latexmk that decides
whether any action is needed, e.g., a rerun of pdflatex. Effectively the Makefile delegates all
decisions to latexmk, while make has no knowledge of the list of source files except for primary
LaTeX file for the document. If there are, for example, graphics files to be made, these must be
made by custom dependencies configured in latexmk.

But something better is needed in more complicated situations, for example, when the making of
graphics files needs to be specified by rules in the Makefile. To do this, one can use a Makefile
like the following:

TARGETS = document1.pdf document2.pdf

27 December 2024 76
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

DEPS_DIR = .deps
LATEXMK = latexmk -recorder -use-make -deps \
-e ’warn qq(In Makefile, turn off custom dependencies\n);’ \
-e ’@cus_dep_list = ();’ \
-e ’show_cus_dep();’
all : $(TARGETS)
$(foreach file,$(TARGETS),$(eval -include $(DEPS_DIR)/$(file)P))
$(DEPS_DIR) :
mkdir $@
%.pdf : %.tex
if [ ! -e $(DEPS_DIR) ]; then mkdir $(DEPS_DIR); fi
$(LATEXMK) -pdf -dvi- -ps- -deps-out=$(DEPS_DIR)/$@P $<
%.pdf : %.fig
fig2dev -Lpdf $< $@

(Again, the lines containing the commands for the rules should be started with tabs.) This
example was inspired by how GNU automake handles automatic dependency tracking of C
source ﬁles.

After each run of latexmk, dependency information is put in a file in the .deps subdirectory. The
Makefile causes these dependency files to be read by make, which now has the full dependency
information for each target .pdf file. To make things less trivial it is specificed that two files
document1.pdf and document2.pdf are the targets. The dependency files are
.deps/document1.pdfP and .deps/document2.pdfP.

There is now no need for the phony prerequisite for the rule to make .pdf files from .tex files. But
I have added a rule to make .pdf files from .fig files produced by the xfig program; these are
commonly used for graphics insertions in LaTeX documents. Latexmk is arranged to output a
dependency file after each run. It is given the -recorder option, which improves its detection of
files generated during a run of pdflatex; such files should not be in the dependency list. The -e
options are used to turn off all custom dependencies, and to document this. Instead the -use-
make is used to delegate the making of missing files to make itself.

Suppose in the LaTeX file there is a command \includegraphics{graph}, and an xfig file
"graph.fig" exists. On a first run, pdflatex reports a missing file, named "graph". Latexmk
succeeds in making "graph.pdf" by calling "make graph.pdf", and after completion of its work, it
lists "fig.pdf" among the dependents of the file latexmk is making. Then let "fig.fig" be updated,
and then let make be run. Make first remakes "fig.pdf", and only then reruns latexmk.

Thus we now have a method by which all the subsidiary processing is delegated to make.

Escaping of characters in dependency lists: There are certain special characters that need to be
escaped when names of ﬁles and directories containing them appear in a dependency list used by
a make program. Generally, such special characters are best avoided.

By default, latexmk does no escaping of this kind, and the user will have to arrange to deal with
the issue separately, if the relevant special characters are used. Note that the rules for escaping
depend on which make program is used, and on its version.

27 December 2024 77
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

One special case is of spaces, since those are particularly prevalent, notably in standard choices
of name for a user’s home directory. So latexmk does provide an option to escape spaces. See
the option -deps_escape=... and the variable $deps_escape for details.

NON_ASCII CHARACTERS IN FILENAMES, RC FILES, ETC

Modern operating systems and file systems allow non-ASCII characters in the names of files and
directories that encompass the full Unicode range. Mostly, latexmk deals with these correctly.
However, there are some situations in which there are problems, notably on Microsoft Windows.
Prior to version 4.77, latexmk had problems with non-ASCII filenames on Windows, even though
there were no corresponding problems on macOS and Linux. These problems are corrected in
the present version.

DETAILS TO BE FILLED IN

SEE ALSO
latex(1), bibtex(1), lualatex(1), pdﬂatex(1), xelatex(1).

BUGS (SELECTED)
Sometimes a viewer (gv) tries to read an updated .ps or .pdf ﬁle after its creation is started but
before the ﬁle is complete. Work around: manually refresh (or reopen) display. Or use one of the
other previewers and update methods.

(The following isn’t really a bug, but concerns features of previewers.) Preview continuous mode
only works perfectly with certain previewers: Xdvi on UNIX/Linux works for dvi files. Gv on
UNIX/Linux works for both postscript and pdf. Ghostview on UNIX/Linux needs a manual
update (reopen); it views postscript and pdf. Gsview under MS-Windows works for both
postscript and pdf, but only reads the updated file when its screen is refreshed. Acroread under
UNIX/Linux views pdf, but the file needs to be closed and reopened to view an updated version.
Under MS-Windows, acroread locks its input file and so the pdf file cannot be updated.
(Remedy: configure latexmk to use sumatrapdf instead.)
THANKS TO
Authors of previous versions. Many users with their feedback, and especially David Coppit
(username david at node coppit.org) who made many useful suggestions that contributed to
version 3, and Herbert Schulz. (Please note that the e-mail addresses are not written in their
standard form to avoid being harvested too easily.)
AUTHOR
Current version, by John Collins (Version 4.86a). Report bugs etc to his e-mail (jcc8 at psu.edu).

Released version can be obtained from CTAN: <http://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk/>, and from

the author’s website <https://www.cantab.net/users/johncollins/latexmk/>.
Modiﬁcations and enhancements by Evan McLean (Version 2.0)
Original script called "go" by David J. Musliner (RCS Version 3.2)

27 December 2024 78
LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

27 December 2024 79

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Latexmk Man1

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LATEXMK(1) General Commands Manual LATEXMK(1)

LATEXMK OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS ON COMMAND LINE

latexmk [options] [ﬁle]

Deﬁnitions of options and arguments

If a ﬁle is speciﬁed without an extension, then the ".tex" extension is automatically

then latexmk will operate on the ﬁle "foo.tex".

This property can also be conﬁgured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 2 in a

This property can also be conﬁgured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 0 in a

This property can also be conﬁgured by setting the $bibtex_use variable to 1 in a

Treatment of ﬁles generated by custom dependencies: If

If $cleanup_includes_cusdep_generated is nonzero, regeneratable ﬁles are considered as

latexmk -bm DRAFT

Note that if the -d option is speciﬁed, the -ps option is assumed.

latexmk -dF "dviselect even" foo.tex

latexmk -e ’$latex=q/latex %O -shell-escape %S/’ ﬁle.tex

latexmk -e "$latex=q/latex %O -shell-escape %S/" ﬁle.tex

latexmk -e "$latex=’latex %O -shell-escape %S’" ﬁle.tex

-g- Turn off -g.

latexmk -pdf -jobname=%A-pdﬂatex *.tex

latexmk -pdf -jobname=%%A-pdﬂatex *.tex

-l- Turn off -l.

latexmk -latex="latex --shell-escape %O %S" foo.tex

See also the $silence_logﬁle_warnings conﬁguration variable.

See also the $silence_logﬁle_warnings conﬁguration variable.

This option is equivalent to using the following set of options

-pdﬂua -dvi- -ps-

-norc Turn off the automatic reading of initialization (rc) ﬁles.

Sets the directory for the output ﬁles of *latex.

(Experimental new feature.)

If FORMAT is anything else, latexmk gives an error.

latexmk -pdf -pdﬂatex="pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S" foo.tex

See also the -usepretex option.

latexmk -pretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ -usepretex foo.tex

But this is better written

latexmk -usepretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ foo.tex

If you already have a suitable command conﬁgured, you only need

latexmk -pretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ foo.tex

-print=dvi, -print=ps, -print=pdf, -print=auto,

latexmk -ps -pF ’psnup -2’ foo.tex

latexmk -ps -pF "psnup -2" foo.tex

-pv- Turn off -pv.

-pvc- Turn off -pvc.

-quiet Same as -silent

-rules Show a list of latemk’s rules and dependencies after processing.

See also the -logﬁlewarninglist and -logﬁlewarninglist- options.

Note that the ﬁlename may be speciﬁed without an extension, e.g., by

See also the documentation for the $use_make_for_missing_ﬁles conﬁguration variable.

latexmk -usepretex=’\AtBeginDocument{Message\par}’ foo.tex

-view=default, -view=dvi, -view=hnt, -view=ps, -view=pdf, -view=none

This option is equivalent to using the following option

An example of the use of the -xelatex option:

latexmk -pdfxe -xelatex="xelatex --shell-escape %O %S" foo.tex

Compatibility between options

% latexmk -pvc -ps thesis # run latex enough times to resolve

source ﬁle changes.

% latexmk -c # remove .aux, .log, .bbl, .blg, .dvi,

DEALING WITH ERRORS, PROBLEMS, ETC

g. See also the section "Advanced Conﬁguration: Some extra resources".

h. Look on tex.stackexchange, i.e., at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/latexmk

i. Ask a question at tex.stackexchange.com.

j. Or ask me (the author of latexmk). My e-mail is at the end of this documentation.

AUXILIARY AND OUTPUT DIRECTORIES

Latexmk also turns emulation on if it is found to be needed, as follows. Suppose emulation is

ALLOWING FOR CHANGE OF OUTPUT FILE TYPE

CONFIGURATION/INITIALIZATION (RC) FILES

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is the value of the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME if it

HOW TO SET VARIABLES IN INITIALIZATION FILES

push @default_ﬁles, ’paper2’;

FORMAT OF COMMAND SPECIFICATIONS

The available placeholders are:

If the variable $pre_tex_code is the empty string, then %P is equivalent to %S.

%U If the variable $pre_tex_code is non-empty, then its value is substituted for %U

$pdf_previewer = ’start "c:/Program Files/SumatraPDF/SumatraPDF.exe" %O %S’;

Command names under Cygwin: If latexmk is executed by Cygwin’s Perl, be particularly

$pdﬂatex = ’pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S; pst2pdf_for_latexmk %B’;

$pdﬂatex = ’cmd /c pdﬂatex --shell-escape %O %S’

$clean_ext = "out %R-blx.bib %R-ﬁgures.log pythontex-ﬁles-%R/";

@default_ﬁles = (".tex", ".dtx");