[XeTeX] Pipes in XeTeX

[Will Robertson]

On 2010-07-27 00:07:02 +0930, Florian Gilcher 
<flo at andersground.net> said:

> I really like the following feature of pdftex and others for 
> development purposes:
> 
>   \input{|"darcs changes -s"} % print a detailed log of changes
> 
> and include that into my document as a "running log" for other reviewers.
> 
> Sure, it requires --shell-escape and --enable-write18, but thats just 
> fine in my environment.

Actually I think this is a MiKTeX-only feature of pdfTeX (or it was 
last time I checked). Is there a significant problem to doing this?:

    \immediate\write18{darcs changes -s > tmp.txt}
    \input{tmp.txt}

Wrap it up in a macro and it's no less convenient than using the pipe, right?

Will