biber, two issues

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2019-06-09 at 16:58:45 +0200, mario chiari wrote:

 > Hi
 >
 > I am not getting it right with biber. Two issues:
 >
 > 1. if I try >>> /usr/local/texlive/2018/bin/x86_64-linux/biber --help
 >
 > I get [...]

It works fine here.  I tested with Perl version 16.3 on CentOS 7 and
with Perl version 24.1 on Debian 9 (stretch) and with all TeX Live
releases from 2010 to 2019.  No problems at all.

Is /usr/local/texlive/2018/bin/x86_64-linux in PATH?  It has to be,
unconditionally.  You can call a particular program by specifying
its location on the command line.  But if this program depends on
other resources, it's mandatory that the TeX Live bin directory is in
PATH.

Please note that according to the error messages you got, some files
are at non-standard locations:

  /var/www/tmp/inc/lib/Unicode/Collate/Locale.pm
  /var/www/tmp/inc/lib/Biber/Internals.pm

I don't know why these files are looked up at /var/www/tmp at all if
you just type biber --help.  It seems that your Perl installation is
completely broken.

I suppose that

  which perl

returns

  /usr/bin/perl

Please run

  printenv | grep -i perl

, unset all Perl related environment variables and try again.

With a clean Perl installation Perl modules are never searched in
/var/www.

 > I suspect it is a Perl issue, but I do not know anything about
 > perl.
 >
 > 2. I use a php script, say my.php, to create a .tex file. It also
 > calls latex, (2016) biber, and pdflatex to produce final outputs.
 >
 > If I run it from terminal - php cli, as root - it works fine. If I
 > run it from a web browser (http://localhost/my.php), biber does not
 > seem to be called at all.  In the latter case, files are owned by
 > user apache, and I suspect that biber does not like that.  How do I
 > fix it?

It's definitely a Perl issue.  But before you care about your web
server, make sure that /usr/bin/perl looks for modules in standard
directories (usually /usr/share or /usr/lib).

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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