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Cade's Dotfiles

`pdflatex: command not found` on macOS with MacTeX installed

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Source: Troubleshooting reference

Symptom. brew list --cask shows mactex and /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex exists and is executable, but pdflatex, latexmk, chktex, and texcount all report “command not found”.

Root cause. MacTeX installs into /Library/TeX/texbin, which is on no default PATH. Its installer drops a /etc/paths.d/TeX entry, but that only reaches path_helper-processed shells, and these profiles rebuild PATH themselves. install/latex.sh verified the binary by absolute path, so the step reported [okay] while nothing was actually reachable.

Confirm.

Terminal window
ls /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex   # exists
command -v pdflatex               # nothing

Fix. Handled by both shell profiles:

Terminal window
[ -d /Library/TeX/texbin ] && path=($path /Library/TeX/texbin)   # zprofile

Appended, not prepended, so Linux’s TinyTeX binaries (symlinked into $ARCH_BIN by latex.sh) keep priority on a machine with both. Run chezmoi apply ~/.zprofile ~/.bash_profile and start a new shell.