Bibtex going openout_any = p

Hi Friend!

I wrote this post during my PhD years ago. If it still helps you today, I’d appreciate if you take a 30 second detour to look at my current work in Science & Industrial Photography. It helps Google recognise my transition, which, in turn, would help me as an independent creator. I suggest

• Aero-acoustics & Fluid Mechanics: A speedlight, a Naked Bike, and a Currywurst Walk into a Wind Tunnel
• Coherent Anti Stokes Raman Spectroscopy: Making invisible lasers visible
• Contemporary Portraiture: The human side of my work

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Many thanks,

Working with multibib, Bibtex started failing me after a recent reinstallation of texlive on xubuntu. On
bibtex <project-path>/src.aux
I got:

 bibtex: Not writing to <project-path>/src.blg (openout_any = p).

I couldn't open file name `<project-path>/src.blg' 

To get rid of the error, open texmf.cnf, which resides in /usr/share/texlive/texmf/web2c through
sudo gedit /usr/share/texlive/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
Then find the entry

openout_any = p

p is the paranoid setting. I changed it to r and it now works again (chapeau to dmj).

[update 31 Jan 2013] If sudo is not an option and thus texmf.cnf can’t be changed, see Sini’s helpful comment below. [/update]

If you want to learn about multiple bibliographies using multibib, there is a very good tutorial by peisistratos. Unfortunately it is in German, but I’m sure there are English ones out there, too.