[XeTeX] Pipes in XeTeX

[Will Robertson]

On 2010-07-28 22:10:49 +0930, Florian Gilcher 
<flo at andersground.net> said:

> Actually, pdftex in both texlive 2009 and 2010 supports it.
> 
> The difference between MiKTeX and texlive is that MiKTeX has a special 
> CLI flag for it (--enable-pipes) while pdftex on texlive checks for 
> (--shell-escape).

Thanks for the info. It's been a couple of years since I used pipes. Is 
this documented *anywhere*? Neither the pdftex nor the texlive 
documentation seem to have anything on this topic.

> Well: the problem with \write18: it is not quite the same (for example, 
> i cannot write to a pipe [1]), it clutters the file system

Since write18 is enabled anyway you can always "rm ..." or "del..." 
your temporary file.

>  and I cannot read from any arbitrary source.

How so? (Not questioning, just curious. I've used write18 a bit and 
haven't run into trouble yet.)

Will