Don't make me manually abort a LaTeX compile when there's an error.

Question

As suggested here, latexmk is a handy way to continually compile your document whenever the source changes. But often when you're working on a document you'll end up with errors and then latex will panic and wait for user input before continuing. That can get very annoying, especially recently when I hacked up something to compile latex directly from an etherpad document, which saves continuously as you type.

Is there a setting for latex or latexmk to make it just abort with an error message if it can't compile? Or, if necessary, how would I set up some kind of Expect script to auto-dismiss LaTeX's complaints?

(I had thought pdflatex's option "-halt-on-error" would do the trick but apparently not.)

Bonus question: Skim on Mac OSX is a nice pdf viewer that autorefreshes when the pdf changes (unlike Preview), except that whenever there's a latex error it makes you reconfirm that you want autorefreshing. Texniscope doesn't have this problem, but I had to ditch Texniscope for other reasons. Is there a way to make Skim always autorefresh, or is there another viewer that gets this right?

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ADDED: Mini-tutorial on latexmk based on the answer to this question:

1. Get latexmk here: http://www.phys.psu.edu/~collins/software/latexmk-jcc/

2. Add the following to your ~/.latexmkrc file:

   $pdflatex = 'pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode';

3. While editing your source file, foo.tex, run the following in a terminal:

   latexmk -pvc -pdf foo.tex

4. Use Skim or another realtime pdf viewer to view foo.pdf.

Voila! Hitting save on foo.tex will now cause foo.pdf to refresh without touching a thing.

Answer 1

With MikTeX, pdflatex has this command-line option:

  -interaction=MODE               Set the interaction mode; MODE must be one
                                  of: batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode,
                                  errorstopmode.

Answer 2

Another possible hack is simply to use:

yes x | latexmk source.tex

You could always create an alias for 'yes x | latexmk' if you're going to use this option lots. The main advantage of this that I can see above the other suggestions is that it is very quick for when you occasionally want latexmk to behave like this.

Mehmet

Answer 3

There is also a \batchmode command may do the work.