Hi,

there’s a behaviour concerning how context handles forced quotes
in command line arguments that I do not understand.

··· <example> ···················································

for i=-1,#environment.rawarguments do
    print(i, environment.rawarguments[i], environment.originalarguments[i])
end

·· </example> ···················································

Now run this as ‘test.lua’ with mtxrun:

  # mtxrun --script test.lua \"simple\" \"more complex\"

Here I get the following output:

··· <result> ····················································

-1  texlua  texlua
0   /home/kokytos/context/tex/texmf-linux/bin/mtxrun    /home/kokytos/context/tex/texmf-linux/bin/mtxrun
1   --script    --script
2   test.lua    test.lua
3   "simple"    simple"
4   "more   more complex
5   complex"    nil

·· </result> ····················································

Number 3 indicates that a quoted argument is fully unquoted iff
it gets parsed into multiple arguments. It also leads to
‘Unbalanced quotes in argument ./simple"’ when used with the main
‘context’ script. It would make sense if you expect only args
containing spaces to be explicitly quoted, though.

I would propose a patch like the one I attached but I’m having
difficulties testing locally modified copies of the core Lua
files, so it remains untested.

Philipp