To get the current $USER in LaTeX

Question

My friend has the following in his computer in a LaTeX document

 \includegraphics[width=13.0cm]{/Users/max/Dropbox/2_user_cases.png}

I would like to have a variable for the username such that we can collaborate faster.

Pseudo-code about what I wont

 \includegraphics[width=13.0cm]{/Users/`echo $USER`/Dropbox/2_user_cases.png}

How can you have such an command inside LaTeX?

Answer 1

use ~ for your homedirectory (which is probably /Users/$USER):

\includegraphics[width=13.0cm]{~/Dropbox/2_user_cases.png}

Answer 2

I'm not sure you can access envvars from LaTeX. As Rutger Nijlunsing has said, you can try "~/" since it is an alias to "/Users/<username>".

If there are other envvars that you need to access, my suggestion is using Makefile to 'compile' the .tex (or a shell script) calling sed to replace such word.

sed -i "s/max/$USER/" file.tex
latex file.tex
bibtex ...
latex ...

Answer 3

in the graphicx package, you can define a folder for latex to look for all your images in, like this:

\graphicspath{{images/}}

In this particular configuration, latex looks for a folder in the same directory as your file called "images."

I don't see why you'd want to use a full path just to get image in...

Make a folder, put your .tex source file in there, create a folder for your images.

Stick you work in some sort of revision control system (git, SVN, etc etc.) Commit often, and you're on your way.