[tex-live] Status of restricted \write18 and epstopdf conversion

Taco Hoekwater taco at elvenkind.com
Mon Oct 19 21:25:25 CEST 2009


Hi,

Akira Kakuto wrote:
> 
> I've found the reason.
> I'm not using texlua as a wrapper of repstopdf etc., while TeX Live
> uses texlua.  texlua can set shellenabledp independently of
> texmf.cnf. 

I have not followed this discussion closely, but are you
sure this is related to the luatex internals? To me it
looks more like a side-effect of \write18: I suspect that
the operating system is starting a command shell to execute
the generated command line, and that that shell interprets
the special symbols it finds.

> I have found that luatex
> set shell escape enabled in texlua mode. The source is
> 
>     if (lua_only)
>         shellenabledp = true;
> 
> in luainit.c.

I really had to do that. texlua is first and foremost a
lua interpreter. Because of the restricted shell feature,
texlua now has to listen to the texmf.cnf settings even
in embedded lua code inside luatex tex input. And because
the actual code is shared between luatex and texlua, if I
did not explicitly enable shellenabledp in the texlua case,
the lua interpreter would not have a working os.execute()
c.s. at all.

Best wishes,
Taco






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