Gdtyjr

Is there a way to have TeX find all files ending on .tex in subdirectories of a certain directory to be used as input?

In my document I would like to include a large number of files from a directory-tree which looks like this:

/transcripts/2013-05/2013-05-12/2013-05-12-transcript1/2013-05-12-transcript1.tex
 /2013-05-12-transcript2/2013-05-12-transcript2.tex
 /2013-05-14/2013-05-14-transcript1/2013-05-14-transcript1.tex
 /2013-06/2013-06-07/2013-06-07-transcript1/2013-06-07-transcript1.tex

I know I can define specific directories with

makeatletter
definput@path./transcripts/./transcripts/2013-05
makeatother

but it would be nice to be able to tell it something like

./transcripts/*/*/*/

Is there any way how to achieve this?

I know that this question addresses a similar issue. However, I don't want to automatically include the files, they will still be specified by `inputfilename:

documentclassarticle 
begindocument

input2013-05-12-transcript1.tex
...
input2013-05-12-transcript2.tex

enddocument

What I'd like to achieve is to be able to only type the name and not have to type the entire filepath every time.

EDIT: As per the suggestion below I have tried to edit /usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf.cnf by adding TEXINPUTS = /path/to/folder//: so that it would search my folders recursively, but clearly I am missing some basic knowledge about how to do that. Anyone able to help me with this?

EDIT2 (2019):
I'm coming back to this question from a while ago:

(a) I haven't been able to get David's answer below to work. Any further help would be appreciated.
(b) I would also still like to find a portable solution, to be specified in the preamble of the document itself. Any ideas?

Don't bother with input@path just set the texmf.cnf or environment variable TEXINPUTS to be

input/transcripts//:

the trailing // means to recursively search subdirectories and the : (or ; on windows) means just prepend this search path to the existing default, so all the standard places are still searched.

I've recreated your file structure and this works for me:

transcripts/
├── 2013-05
│   ├── 2013-05-12
│   │   ├── 2013-05-12-transcript1
│   │   │   └── 2013-05-12-transcript1.tex
│   │   └── 2013-05-12-transcript2
│   │   └── 2013-05-12-transcript2.tex
│   └── 2013-05-14
│   └── 2013-05-14-transcript1
│   └── 2013-05-14-transcript1.tex
└── 2013-06
 └── 2013-06-07
 └── 2013-06-07-transcript1
 └── 2013-06-07-transcript1.tex

The file 2013-05-12-transcript1.tex is textbfFirst, file 2013-05-12-transcript2.tex is textbfSecond, file 2013-05-14-transcript1.tex is textbfThird, file 2013-05-14-transcript1.tex is textbfFourth, and the example file is as follows:

% arara: pdflatex
documentclassarticle 
begindocument

input2013-05-12-transcript1.tex
...
input2013-05-12-transcript2.tex
...
input2013-05-14-transcript1.tex
...
input2013-06-07-transcript1.tex

enddocument

Windows

I've saved it in D:transcripts

Temporary configuration

Open a command line cmd (you do not need administrator privileges) and you execute:

set TEXINPUTS=D:/transcripts//;
pdflatex sampleforum.tex

this will work until you close the command line, that is, you must execute the line every
time after close a command line ... tedious ... yes.

Permanent configuration

Open a command line cmd (you do not need administrator privileges) and execute:

setx TEXINPUTS D:/transcripts//;

close command line and open a new and execute:

reg query HKEY_CURRENT_USEREnvironment
pdflatex sampleforum.tex

In this way we have configured the environment variable and now it is permeating.

And to delete TEXINPUTS from environment variable, just use:

reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USEREnvironment /v TEXINPUTS /f

Alternatively this can be done in a graphical mode adjusting your environment variable .

Linux

I've saved it in ~/transcripts

Add to our file .bashrc the line:

export TEXINPUTS='~/transcripts//:'

Another option would be to use tlmgr conf auxtrees, but the directory would have in TDS form.

Saludos