LaTeX, BibTeX, and Symbolic Links

The bane of my existence: multiple copies of the same file in different locations on my computer or computers. The copies may be identical or they may be of slightly different versions. I'm notorius for this and it confuses me to no end.

Here's an example: When I write papers, I use a bib file to store the BibTeX entries of my citations. With each new paper, I move the latest version of the bib file to the directory that contains the tex files of the paper and update the bib file with more entries as necessary. The result is that I have multiple versions of the same bib file strewn throughout my home directory.

Until now! In a move that did not take a lot of brain power, I created a directory ~/latex/common-files and put my bib file in there. Now each time I create a directory for a new paper, I'll create a symbolic link in that directory to the bib file in my common-files directory. Hence, my last post about symlinks.

Why don't I just put the path to the original bib file into the \bibliography line of my tex file and dispense with the symlink? That would be the most convenient, but it could potentially cause some problems with uploading papers to submission sites. With the symlink, all references in the tex file will be to files in the same directory as the tex file. Therefore, I won't have to change any paths before uploading. The proof of course will be in the pudding. We'll see if this actually works.