[luatex] Wildcard expansion by texlua on Windows

[Joseph Wright]

On 07/03/2024 18:22, Joseph Wright wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I wonder if the handling of wildcard arguments by LuaTeX running as
> texlua is documented anywhere, and if it's controllable.
>
> With LuaTeX, irrespective of platform, arguments are passed 'as is' to
> Lua, so if we have a test.tex file
>
>      \directlua{for _,v in ipairs(arg) do print(v) end}
>      \end
>
> and run
>
>      luatex test.tex '*' -- macOS/Linux
>      luatex test.tex *  -- Windows
>
> we print "*". On the other hand, if we have test.lua file
>
>      for _,v in ipairs(arg) do print(v) end
>
> and try
>
>      texlua test.lua '*' -- macOS/Linux
>      texlua test.lua *   -- Windows
>
> we get "*" on macOS/Linux and ... whatever is in the current directory
> on Windows. If we use '*' there, that's *exactly* what gets shown - no
> expansion, but also no loss of the ' chars (of course we can clean up).
>
> I *think* that the only expansion is the same as e.g. dir would do -
> only "*" and "?", and if there are no matches things are passed on as-is.
>
> I can't see that this behaviour is documented anywhere, nor if it's at
> all controllable.
>
> Does anyone have any insight?
>
> Joseph

BTW, seems to be TeX Live specific, or perhaps MiKTeX-excluded ...

Joseph