Hi - as of perhaps a month or so ago (I believe), (e)(u)ptex has started looking for texmf.cnf when given --help and --version before giving the expected output. The other engines don't look for texmf.cnf, so far as I know. It is better for those basic options to work without requiring texmf.cnf, or anything else, to be installed/findable, e.g., when running in the build directory. The result is the warning about "configuration file texmf.cnf not found". For example, cd .../Build/source/Work/texk/web2c ./ptex --version warning: kpathsea: configuration file texmf.cnf not found in these directories: [long long list omitted] .. pTeX 3.141592653-p4.0.0 (utf8.euc) (TeX Live 2023/dev) Compared with: $ ./tex --version TeX 3.141592653 (TeX Live 2023/dev) (that is, no warning is emitted) Thanks, Karl