Permanence of strange .tex file

[Paul A. Rubin]

On 8/27/21 4:51 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2021, Paul A. Rubin wrote:
>
>> Do you by any chance have instant preview turned on in Tools > 
>> Preferences > Look & Feel > Display.
>
> Paul,
>
> Huh! It was turned on, but I've no recollection of ever doing this. 
> And, as
> I wrote, it's never before been an issue. So I turned it off.
>
>> The presence of "preview" in the file name suggests to me that LyX might
>> have been compiling something for instant preview.
>
> Could be. I opened LyX, looked in preferences (but not Display), exited,
> then found Display and turned off instant preview. There were to *.tex 
> files
> using the CPUs after I exited the second time. Killed both processes.
>
>> 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.
>
> If yesterday's files were in /tmp find should have found them. It didn't.
>
> Anyway, however the instant preview became active it's now off. Must be
> pandemic related, eh? :-)
>
> Stay well,
>
> Rich
Rich,

The seldom benevolent digital deities have been on a bit of a rampage 
lately, based on personal experience. I don't know if it's caused by the 
pandemic, global warming, a surfeit of politicians (note that I'm 
listing disasters in ascending order of severity) or just random timing.

Anyway, hopefully the issue is fixed. The (presumed) fact that instant 
preview produced LaTeX processes that spun their digital wheels 
indefinitely might, however, indicate that you have something (math 
inset? other sort of inset?) that is indigestible to LaTeX, in which 
case the same problem may arise if and when you actually do compile the 
parent document.

Or maybe not. I've given up predicting the outcome of anything digital.

Paul