What does kpsewhere do?

Hello Ubuntu community,

I had a look at this page

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/160702/how-do-i-write-documents-using-llncs-cls-without-having-to-put-it-in-the-same-fo

to fix a similar issue I had. From the answer it appears I should launch the command kpsewhere. Since I don't know what this command does, I tried

kpsewhere --help

but the explanation wasn't really clear to me. I guess it searches for the location of its argument. And what else?

Solution 1:

The kpsewhere is a part of texlive-extra-utils package.

It has a man-page - you can read it locally man kpsewhere or online to get preliminary knowledge about it:

NAME
kpsewhere - Expanding kpsewhich to separately iterate over each texmf tree listed in $TEXMF.

…

DESCRIPTION
kpsewhere is an extension to kpsewhich (as where is for which in tcsh). The intention is to provide a way to check for conflicts/shadowed files. It will, however, only find one file per TEXMF tree.