[tex-live] kpsewhich

[Hans Hagen]

At 17:08 26/03/2004, you wrote:
>        kpsewhich -expand-var "\$SELFAUTOPARENT"
>        kpsewhich -expand-var '$SELFAUTOPARENT'
>
>Does \$SELFAUTOPARENT work on Windows?

concerning this shell expansion ...

it seems already painful to support two operating systems 
(windows/unix+clones); imagine what would happen if nice alternatives like 
beos or amigaos or the acorn one had taken off (i.e if we had the diversity 
on enormally encounters, take for instance cars as a comparison) ... we 
would be in big troubles then, wouldn't we?

so, maybe we should look at all scripts/tools and get rid of all things 
that somehow may interfere with os specific things, a kind of micro tex-os 
like environment built into kpse:

   kpsewhich --envvar=WHATEVER

then returns the meaning of $WHATEVER or %WHATEVER% or WHATEVER* the os env 
var is set to

this particularly starts making sense when kpse becomes a service (deamon) 
and speed is no issue

Hans