[latexrefman] Fwd: What does « write part of a line » mean ?

[Vincent Belaïche]

Karl,
You are perfectly right. Just as an example the wording you use is
roughly the same as the unix Scilab command that is used to pass
command lines to the shell.

https://help.scilab.org/docs/6.0.1/fr_FR/unix.html
https://help.scilab.org/docs/6.0.1/en_US/unix.html

However in Scilab rather than mentioning the operating system as a
whole, they refer to the shell, or command interpreter. The French
version is even more precise as it suggest that the command
interpreter is dependent on the underlying operating system by
directly simply referring to sh or dos.

Maybe we should get inspired by this and describe \write18 as follows:

* \write18::          Pass a command line to the operating system shell.
* \write18::          Passe une ligne de command à l'interpréteur du
système d'exploitation.

  Vincent.

Le mer. 1 avr. 2020 à 00:43, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> a écrit :
>
>     the command interpretation is done by the shell, not by LaTeX
>
> Yes, sure. And that is exactly what my description says:
> > * \write18::          Run an operating system command.
>
> I used "Run" instead of "Write to" precisely because of the point that
> (La)TeX is not doing any interpretation.
>
>     I think that there is a phrase for that : ↓ Do a system call ⊇ / ↓ Faire
>     un appel syst∬me ⊇ would be both more concise and more clear.
>
> No, "system call" has another meaning in English. A "system call" is a
> function provided by the kernel, like open(2). Although it would be
> comprehensible, the text I put in is better. IMNSHO :). --best, karl.