Multiplatform solution to file manipulation

tohecz commented 6 years ago

Currently, file manipulation is done by running cp, rm and friends by names. This is platform dependent. The LaTeX3 team promised they'll look into this and eventually provide l3sys wrappers for these.

The list of commands that would be useful:

cp folder/file.ext anotherfolder/anotherfile.ext
mv folder/file.ext anotherfolder/anotherfile.ext
mkdir -p folder (make sure the folder exists)
rm -f folder/*.ext (make sure that folder does not contain any *.ext files)
mkdir -p folder && rm -f folder/*.ext (this is what we actually need: the previous two entries combined, i.e. make sure that folder exists and does not contain any *.ext files)
rm file.ext
gs SOME OPTIONS HERE < /dev/null (a standard call to GhostScript e.g. to convert a PDF to grayscale)
calls to standard *TeX tools (should work out of the box in all platforms)
pwd (get the current working directory; note that we need result of this operation, not just having this called); this would allow to drop currfile.sty dependency.

While we are here, there are other possibly useful things:

ls and ls -R
wget
ImageMagick calls working if ImageMagick is installed

josephwright commented 6 years ago

I've logged a core issue: I'll likely start small ...

eg9 commented 6 years ago

Security issues should be examined with great care, see repstopdf versus epstopdf.

josephwright commented 6 years ago

@eg9 Support here is all dependent on shell escape: the security issues are handled at the engine level, really.

tohecz commented 6 years ago

Hi Enrico! Sure that's correct, but on the other hand, that's possibly an issue on the L3 site. On my site, the person running pdflatex file.tex has a full control of what he asks for, so he should make sure to be safe...

josephwright commented 6 years ago

I've added a first-pass set of functions here: the gs one is more-or-less impossible as it's not on the path on Windows as-standard. Thus far I've covered the basic file/shell ops. I think calling a TeX tool shouldn't need any abstract logic: just

\sys_shell_now:n { <engine> ~ <filename> }

should be OK I think.

josephwright commented 6 years ago

(Same comment could be logged under https://github.com/latex3/latex3/issues/468, but the detail is given here anyway.)

tohecz / yoin

Multiplatform solution to file manipulation #3