texlua-based tool and restricted shell escape

[Nicola Talbot]

On 20/02/2024 22:16, Karl Berry wrote:
> Nicola did good work with the Java texosquery, but she and I knew all
> along that Java is, as you say, "non-ideal" for portability.
> 
> Whether the equivalent of "ls" (what texosquery does) should be an
> allowed operation is another discussion. I admit I can't remember
> Nicola's argument for why it was ok to allow this, but evidently she
> convinced me :). --best, karl.

My main reason for writing texosquery was to obtain the system locale 
information. Lua just returned "C" when I tried it on Linux, which 
wasn't any use as I needed the locale tag (LC_ALL etc is only useful for 
*nix). Java is at least platform independent, but it seemed overkill to 
write a Java application just to lookup the locale so I added some extra 
features that might be useful.

texosquery uses kpsewhich and honours the openin_any setting so it won't 
provide any information about files that wouldn't be allowed read access 
via TeX.

Regards
Nicola