[EMBOSS] emma/clustalw PATH problems

[Anders Nistér]

I am trying to run emma, and for certain reasons i don't have clustalw in my
PATH.

Running emma produces this error:

   EMBOSS An error in ajsys.c at line 398:
cannot find program 'clustalw'


Looking through the manual for emma there is a mention of EMBOSS_CLUSTALW:

   "cannot find program 'clustalw'" - means that the ClustalW program has
   not been set up on your site or is not in your environment (i.e. is
   not on your path). The solutions are to (1) install clustalw in the
   path so that emma can find it with the command "clustalw", or (2)
   define a variable (an environment variable of in emboss.defaults or
   your .embossrc file) called EMBOSS_CLUSTALW containing the command
   (program name or full path) to run clustalw if you have it elsewhere
   on your system.

So I'm supposed to be able to specify the full path to clustalw through
EMBOSS_CLUSTALW....

Setting this variable to the full path of clustalw produces a similar error
to the one before.

   EMBOSS An error in ajsys.c at line 398:
cannot find program '/usr/local/bin/clustalw'

Looking through the emma source code I can see that ajSystemEnv is used to
execute clustalw, this function will always look through the PATH env
variable for the executable it is trying to run, so specifying a full path
does absolutely nothing to get around the problem.

Is the documentation wrong or is this a bug ?
Has anyone got a workaround ?
Is there any emboss function for executing an external program directly,
without it being present in PATH ?

/Anders Nistér