Permanence of strange .tex file

[Paul A. Rubin]

On 8/26/21 3:27 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
> Here's another new experience for me. When I kill the lyx process there
> remains a file, for example lyxpreviewN17596.tex, which shows up in the
> process list as 'latex lyxpreviewN17596.tex' and consumes 100% of the 
> CPUs
> most of the time.
>
> Root cannot find this file anywhere, and it persists after I close 
> lyx, even
> when I did not open the compiled PDF or look at a preview within lyx.
>
> I kill the process but haven't seen this before and would like to 
> understand
> what might be behind this behavior.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rich
Do you by any chance have instant preview turned on in Tools > 
Preferences > Look & Feel > Display. The presence of "preview" in the 
file name suggests to me that LyX might have been compiling something 
for instant preview. As far as the undead process, if LyX spawns a latex 
/ pdflatex / whatever process to compile something and then you kill 
LyX, the child process does not get killed automatically (at least in my 
experience). You have to nuke it manually. I would expect the 
lyxpreviewN17596.tex file to be stashed in the LyX temporary directory 
for the parent document.

Paul