What is kpsexpand?

Question

gnuplot is giving the error: "sh: kpsexpand: not found."

I feel like the guy in Office Space when he saw "PC LOAD LETTER". What the heck is kpsexpand?

I searched Google, and there were a lot of pages that make reference to kpsexpand, and say not to worry about it, but I can't find anything, anywhere that actually explains what it is.

Even the man page stinks:

$ man kpsexpand

kpsetool - script to make teTeX-style kpsetool, kpsexpand, and kpsepath available

Edit: Again, I'm not asking what to do -- I know what to do, thanks to Google. What I'm wondering is what the darn thing is.

Answer 1

This is on the first page of google search results for "kpexpand gnuplot":

http://dschneller.blogspot.com/2007/06/visualize-hard-disk-temperature-with.html

It says that you do not need to care about the error-messages.

Here is the man-page for kpexpand:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/kpsexpand

Answer 2

kpsexpand, kpsetool and kpsepath are all wrappers for kpsewhich that deals with finding tex-related files kpsexpand is used to expand environment varibles. Say $VAR1 is "Hello World" and $VAR2 is "/home/where/I/belong" then

$ kpsexpand $VAR1

will return

Hello World

and

$ kpsexpand $VAR2

will return

/home/where/I/belong

kpsewhich is reminiscent to which just like which progname will search the directories in the $PATH environment variable and return the path of the first found progname, kpsewhich filename will search the directories in the various tex-paths, fonts, packages, etc. for filename.

to find out more lookup kpsewhich either in man or on google, and check out the source of kpsexpand

less `which kpsexpand`

Cheers /B2S