[tex-live] kpsewhich

[Hans Hagen]

At 13:41 27/03/2004, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Interpreting command-line args
>
>How about an option to take args from a file (or stdin)?  That is,
>kpsewhich --file=foo would read foo and interpret it as more arguments.

sounds like a valid option (could even be an xml file then, so that we have 
a well defined syntax and char set)

it would also means that we can precook scripts:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<kpse xmlns="...>
   <optionset>
     <other-text-files>...</other-text-files>
   </optionset>
   <optionset>
     <other-text-files>...</other-text-files>
   </optionset>
</kpse>

and provide a bunch of things like:

   kpsewhich --file=allfonts.xml
   kpsewhich --file=allformats.xml
   kpsewhich --file=contextformats.xml

and then the shortcut:

   kpserequest allfonts

>Then the perl/ruby/whatever script can write foo (in its
>system-independent way) and call kpsewhich (in this
>acceptable-to-all-systems simple way).
>
>If there's no quoting mechanism that works on both Windows and Unix,
>there's no way to use any special characters on any command line (if you
>want to write a script that runs on both without change).

maybe we need some kind of escape like in url's

Hans