I have just installed poppler on my debian server using the command:
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
However, when I execute the command:
pdftocairo --help
The function cannot be found, so I assume this program has not automatically linked into my PATH variable. My issue is that I am not very experienced with Linux and I don't know how to find out where poppler installed, nor how to create a link file to Poppler from an existing included PATH location.
Any help would be appreciated, especially if someone can explain how I know where these programs are installing themselves.
you should not need to do anything with the PATH - it's the maintainer's task to make everything work "as expected".
your problem could have several reasons:
- your version of
poppler-utils does not come with the pdftocairo binary
- your version of
poppler-utils insatlls pdftocairo into a path that is not in your PATH
- you (or somebody else) have messed with the
PATH, so it doesn't contain the directory where poppler-utils installed the binaries to any more.
so first check whether poppler-utils installs the file (and where to).
the following will give you a list of all files installed by the package:
$ dpkg -L poppler-utils
[...]
/usr/bin/pdftops
/usr/bin/pdftocairo
/usr/bin/pdftohtml
[...]
as you can see, on my system - which has poppler-utils 0.18.4-6 installed - the package installed a pdftocairo into /usr/bin which is the default path for all applications, and which should already be in your PATH.
to check your PATH variable do something like
$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
as you can see, my PATH contains /usr/bin, and indeed i can do:
$ pdftocairo --help
pdftocairo version 0.18.4
Copyright 2005-2011 The Poppler Developers - http://poppler.freedesktop.org
Copyright 1996-2004 Glyph & Cog, LLC
[...]
if your PATH does not contain /usr/bin, then something is seriously wrong with your system (for instance, you have tried changing your path and accidentally removed all the previous settings).
in any case, adding a new path to PATH is quite simple; all paths are separated by colons, so you should do something like the following:
$ export PATH=/path/to/my/bin:${PATH}
this will add /path/to/my/bin/ at the beginning of the search-path, so all binaries will now be searched first in /path/to/my/bin/ and then /usr/local/bin and so forth.
