[tex-live] Status of restricted \write18 and epstopdf conversion

[Alexander Cherepanov]

Hi Taco!
On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:25:25 +0200, Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> wrote:

>> I've found the reason.
>> I'm not using texlua as a wrapper of repstopdf etc., while TeX Live
>> uses texlua.  texlua can set shellenabledp independently of
>> texmf.cnf. 

> I have not followed this discussion closely, but are you
> sure this is related to the luatex internals? To me it
> looks more like a side-effect of \write18: I suspect that
> the operating system is starting a command shell to execute
> the generated command line, and that that shell interprets
> the special symbols it finds.

AIUI \write18 doesn't start a shell but calls repstopdf which in turn 
runs "perl epstopdf.pl" through a number of wrappers. And one of these 
wrappers indeed runs next command with all arguments in a shell. At 
this point a pipe symbol from arguments seems to touch a shell.

Alexander Cherepanov