Finally, it seems that I have the problem again and it is connected to this that I am configuring the place where MiKTeX places the smylinks to the executables to a place different than the default.
On MACOS the default place is /usr/local/bin. Because I am using TeXDist in order to have several TeX distros on the same machine I reconfigured this place to /Library/TeX/Distributions/MiKTeX.texdist/Contents/texbin using the MiKTeX console / Administrator / Settings / Directories / Link target directory. V. ________________________________ De : Vincent Belaïche <vincent....@hotmail.fr> Envoyé : vendredi 9 octobre 2020 22:19 À : MikTeX user group list <miktex-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Objet : RE: Problems with kpsewhich on MACOS Just to say that I have solved my problem as follows: 1) open the MiKTeX console 2) select administrator mode 3) go to cleanup pannel (select it on the left choice list) 4) select restore « factory default » Now things work again as expected, but the sad news is that I had to reinstall a few packages… Vincent. ________________________________ De : Vincent Belaïche Envoyé : vendredi 9 octobre 2020 17:45 À : MikTeX user group list <miktex-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Objet : Problems with kpsewhich on MACOS Hello, I have MiKTeX installed on MACOS, and it seems that for some reason kpsewhich got broken, so the whole install is broken indeed. I already had that sort of problem, the root cause it that MiKTeX uses some dynamic library with a name that is versionned instead of asking for the latest version, so when there is a system update sometimes it happens that MiKTeX gets broken. So if I type kpsewhich I get: ERROR: collate_byname<char>::collate_byname failed to construct for Sorry, but kpsewhich did not succeed. And if I try to compile a document with content \documentclass{minimal}\begin{document}Hello.\end{document}, then I get: ERROR: collate_byname<char>::collate_byname failed to construct for Sorry, but pdflatex did not succeed. libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type MiKTeX::Core::MiKTeXException: MiKTeX encountered an internal error. Abort trap: 6 _______________________________________________ Q: How can I leave the mailing list? A: See https://miktex.org/faq/how-can-i-leave-the-mailing-list