system call to pdflatex

kosta has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi folks, I am going CRAZY from this, any help MUCH appreciated!!! I have a perl script that creates a tex file.. Now after the tex file is completed I want to convert it it pdf via pdflatex.... So I call:

system "/usr/bin/pdflatex -output-directory /tmp /tmp/perl.tex";
system "mv /tmp/perl.pdf /export/www/html/auth/download/";
[download]

Now what happens is that the generated pdf is unreadable (.log file says :

[1{/usr/share/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map
Error: /usr/bin/pdflatex (file /usr/share/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/u
+pdmap/pdf
tex.map): fflush() failed
 ==> Fatal error occurred, the output PDF file is not finished!
[download]

The funny part is that when I log in via ssh (and even change my user to apache by typing "su apache") then pdflatex works just fine... If I run those two command outside of perl

$ /usr/bin/pdflatex -output-directory /tmp /tmp/perl.tex
$ mv /tmp/perl.pdf /export/www/html/auth/download/
[download]

=> this works np. Why the heck is perl not able to call the system properly?! Any ideas? Anybody who created pdfs this wat and can help? PLLLLS :)

Comment on system call to pdflatex Select or Download Code

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Re: system call to pdflatex by Corion (Patriarch) on Nov 24, 2011 at 12:05 UTC
Does your script actually run as the user `apache`? Does the user as which the script runs really have the appropriate permissions? Is something like AppArmor or SELinux active? You don't check the result of system - you should do that to be able to stop the process and generate an error message for the user.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: system call to pdflatex by kosta (Sexton) on Nov 24, 2011 at 12:21 UTC
got it - the whole time I didnt realize (know) that the "system" perl call uses / as its working dir, not the working dir of the perl script... And he obviously didnt have right to write there so... putting `cd /tmp &&` In front of every system call fixed it... took me 3 hours to realize this... GREAT!	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: system call to pdflatex by choroba (Cardinal) on Nov 24, 2011 at 12:33 UTC
the "system" perl call uses / as its working dir, not the working dir of the perl script Not true. Check `perl -e 'system q{/bin/pwd}'` [download] Somehow you are setting the script's working directory to /.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: system call to pdflatex by Corion (Patriarch) on Nov 24, 2011 at 12:35 UTC
... it may also be that Apache is launching the Perl script with a working directory of `/`.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: system call to pdflatex by choroba (Cardinal) on Nov 24, 2011 at 12:37 UTC