LaTeX Style Directories

Note that the below is not correct. The directory expansion is not required; you may indicate that a directory should be searched recursively by appended a double slash to it:

  export TEXINPUTS="/opt/latex//:"
  export BSTINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS

Old Stuff

It makes the most sense to put all your commonly used LaTeX class and bibliography style files in one reasonably organized place, e.g. /usr/local/latex/. On most setups, you have to tell LaTeX and BibTeX where this is. LaTeX/TeX uses the TEXINPUTS environment variable to enable users to extend the search path for style and class files. BibTeX uses BSTINPUTS for bibliography style files.

Neither will recurse subdirectories, so you have to include in those environment variables all the directories you actually want to use. Also, they will append their default paths to the end of that list. At least in some versions of the programs, it's critical that the relevant variables end on a ':' so they don't get confused. Kind of silly, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. The easiest way to do all this is to put something similar to the following in your login script, e.g. your .bashrc:

  for i in `find /usr/local/latex -type d`
  do
    TEXINPUTS=$i:$TEXINPUTS
  done
  export TEXINPUTS
  export BSTINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS