Hi Bruce,
Am 19.08.25 um 03:35 schrieb Bruce Horrocks:
On 18 Aug 2025, at 18:34, Henning Hraban Ramm <te...@fiee.net> wrote:
I guess that was what I was asking for, but not what I needed.
I'm still confused as to what you're actually trying to do!
In a module, I want to accept paths that contain ~ (=$HOME) or other
shell variables.
For my current needs, I only need to expand ~, but I’m trying to learn
to do things in Lua that I know in Python.
$TEXMFsomething was a bad example since the TeX variables contain a list
of directories.
An OS independent solution would be best – since it’s %HOME% on Windows,
AFAIK.
1) Do you want a list of all environment variables that are set? If so and your target
system is Unix-like, then there is the command `printenv` that you could call via
os.execute("printenv").
no
2) Do you want process a string containing a file path where some of the
components might be environment variables and you want to expand them the way
the shell would?
yes
If so then there is a Posix function `wordexp` (man 3 wordexp) which does that.
You'll need to wrap it in a C API call.
wordexp looks like the right thing, but I don’t speak C – would I need
to write & compile some C code for that? It looks like that in the Lua
manual.
There’s also luaposix, but I’d like to avoid a dependency.
Hraban
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