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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label typend</title>
</head><body>
<h3>&ldquo;Please type a command or say <code>\</code><code>end</code>&rdquo;</h3>
<p/>Sometimes, when you are running (La)TeX, it will abruptly stop and
present you with a prompt (by default, just a <code>*</code> character).  Many
people (including this author) will reflexively hit the &lsquo;return&rsquo;
key, pretty much immediately, and of course this is no help at all &mdash;
TeX just says:
<pre>
(Please type a command or say `\end')
</pre>
and prompts you again.
<p/>What&rsquo;s happened is that your (La)TeX file has finished prematurely,
and TeX has fallen back to a supposed including file, from the
terminal.  This could have happened simply because you&rsquo;ve omitted
the <code>\</code><code>bye</code> (Plain TeX), <code>\</code><code>end{document}</code> (LaTeX), or
whatever.  Other common errors are failure to close the braces round a
command&rsquo;s argument, or (in LaTeX) failure to close a verbatim
environment: in such cases you&rsquo;ve already read and accepted an
error message about encountering end of file while scanning something.
<p/>If the error is indeed because you&rsquo;ve forgotten to end your document,
you can insert the missing text: if you&rsquo;re running Plain TeX, the
advice, to &ldquo;say <code>\</code><code>end</code>&rdquo; is good enough: it will kill the run; if
you&rsquo;re running LaTeX, the argument will be necessary:
<code>\</code><code>end{document}</code>.  
<p/>However, as often as not this isn&rsquo;t the problem, and (short of
debugging the source of the document before ending) brute force is
probably necessary.  Excessive force (killing the job that&rsquo;s
running TeX) is to be avoided: there may well be evidence in the
<code>.log</code> file that will be useful in determining what the
problem is &mdash; so the aim is to persuade TeX to shut itself down
and hence flush all log output to file.
<p/>If you can persuade TeX to read it, an end-of-file indication
(control-<code>D</code> under Unix, control-<code>Z</code> under Windows) will provoke
TeX to report an error and exit immediately.  Otherwise you should
attempt to provoke an error dialogue, from which you can exit (using
the <code>x</code> &lsquo;command&rsquo;).  An accessible error could well be inserting an
illegal character: what it is will depend on what macros you are
running.  If you can&rsquo;t make that work, try a silly command name or
two.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=typend">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=typend</a>
</body>