[tex-live] kpsewhich

Thomas Esser te at dbs.uni-hannover.de
Sat Mar 27 16:31:28 CET 2004


> i'm aware of the differences in shell expansion (and taking care of it in 
> the process of keeping scripts multiplatform has messed up many scripts i 
> made) -)

perl can well execute commands without invoking the system's command
shell. Putting everything into *one big string* and let the system's
command shell do the parsing/splitting is convenient, but not portable,
as you know. If you make the splitting on your own, you can completely
avoid the command shell:

    http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/func/system.html

    ...
    If there is only one scalar argument, the argument is checked for
    shell metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire argument is
    passed to the system's command shell for parsing (this is /bin/sh
    -c on Unix platforms, but varies on other platforms).
    ...

Thomas


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