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+<head>
+<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label tempinst</title>
+</head><body>
+<h3>&ldquo;Temporary&rdquo; installation of (La)TeX files</h3>
+<p/>Operating systems and applications need to know where to find files:
+many files that they need are &ldquo;just named&rdquo; &mdash; the user doesn&rsquo;t
+necessarily know <em>where</em> they are, but knows to ask for them.
+The commonest case, of course, is the commands whose names you type to
+a shell (yes, even Windows&rsquo; &ldquo;MSDOS prompt&rdquo;) are using a shell to read what
+you type: many of the commands simply involve loading and executing a
+file, and the <code>PATH</code> variable tells the shell where to find those files.
+<p/>Modern TeX implementations come with a bunch of search paths
+built in to them. In most circumstances these paths are adequate, but
+one sometimes needs to extend them to pick up files in strange
+places: for example, we may wish to try a new bundle of packages
+before <a href="FAQ-installthings.html">installing them &lsquo;properly&rsquo;</a>. To do
+this, we need to change the relevant path as TeX perceives it.
+However, we don&rsquo;t want to throw away TeX&rsquo;s built-in path (all of a
+sudden, TeX won&rsquo;t know how to deal with all sorts of things).
+<p/>To <em>extend</em> a TeX path, we define an operating system
+environment variable in &lsquo;path format&rsquo;, but leaving a gap which TeX
+will fill with its built-in value for the path. The commonest case is
+that we want to place our extension in front of the path, so that our
+new things will be chosen in preference, so we leave our &lsquo;gap to be
+filled&rsquo; at the end of the environment variable. The syntax is simple
+(though it depends which shell you&rsquo;re actually using): so on a
+Unix-like system, using the <i>bash</i> shell, the job might be
+done like:
+<pre>
+ export TEXINPUTS=/tmp:
+</pre>
+while in a Windows system, within a MSDOS window, it would be:
+<pre>
+ set TEXINPUTS=C:/temp;
+</pre>
+In either case, we&rsquo;re asking TeX to load files from the root disc
+temporary files directory; in the Unix case, the &ldquo;empty slot&rdquo; is
+designated by putting the path separator &lsquo;<code>:</code>&rsquo; on its own at the end
+of the line, while in the Windows case, the technique is the same, but
+the path separator is &lsquo;<code>;</code>&rsquo;.
+<p/>Note that in either sort of system, the change will only affect
+instances of TeX that are started from the shell where the
+environment variable was set. If you run TeX from another window,
+it will use the original input path. To make a change of input path
+that will &ldquo;stick&rdquo; for all windows, set the environment variable in
+your login script or profile (or whatever) in a Unix system and log
+out and in again, or in <i>autoexec.bat</i> in a Windows system, and
+reboot the system.
+<p/>While all of the above has talked about where TeX finds its macro
+files, it&rsquo;s applicable to pretty much any sort of file any
+TeX-related program reads &mdash; there are lots of these paths, and of
+their corresponding environment variables. In a
+<i>web2c</i>-based system, the copious annotations in the
+<i>texmf.cnf</i> system configuration file help you to learn which
+path names correspond to which type of file.
+<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=tempinst">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=tempinst</a>
+</body>