TeX, LaTeX and Friends

I wonder if it's possible to somehow have in a tex file a command that every time I run the tex file send the whole content to a certain mail address.

Paulo Cereda

@OFFSHARING Aloha!

Christian Hupfer

@OFFSHARING I was here before :-P (This message was brought to you by another bloke named Chris... ;-))

OFFSHARING

I'm worried about my work due to some strange coincidences.

@ChristianHupfer Ah, I see. :-)

Is it possible to have such a thing in my tex files?

Paulo Cereda

@OFFSHARING not without some heavy external trickery. And certainly not from TeX.

OFFSHARING

@PauloCereda I see. This makes me feel somehow better, I'm not an expert at all in the area of tex files.

Christian Hupfer

11:01 AM

@OFFSHARING Do you want to spam the mail account? Each TeX run?

@PauloCereda ARARA can do. Please say, that ARARA can do this! Please!!!!!! ;-)

OFFSHARING

@ChristianHupfer I only wanted to know if it's possible that every time I run a text file then automatically the content of the file is sent to a certain mail address. I hope such a thing is not possible!!!

Paulo Cereda

@ChristianHupfer Of course arara can do. But it is insanely complicated to write such rule. :)

David Carlisle

@OFFSHARING to run any system command then the user needs to run latex --shell-escape (but if you do do that then it can run any command that you can run, including mail, or whatever) Otherwise it is prevented from running commands and from writing files in unexpected places

Christian Hupfer

@PauloCereda Insanely complicated, even for an insane Duck? :-P

Paulo Cereda

@ChristianHupfer: I once wrote this when I was working with nightingale (which is my arara sandbox): vimeo.com/103023271

OFFSHARING

11:04 AM

@DavidCarlisle I mean I worked in a file that was sent to me, and now I'm concerned if within the file one can hide such a command such that I cannot see it.

David Carlisle

@OFFSHARING the other person can hide such a command but it will not activate unless you choose to allow commands to run by using latex --shell-escape instead of latex to process the document.

OFFSHARING

@DavidCarlisle Not sure I understand these details, but this is due to my knowledge. How may I see what is hidden in the files?

Say I have the file aaa.tex I open it and see a lot of commands. Then I wanna see what is possibly hidden.

David Carlisle

\documentclass{article}

\immediate\write18{ls}

\begin{document}
\end{document}

run that and look in the log, it will say

runsystem(ls)...disabled (restricted).

OFFSHARING

@DavidCarlisle I have \documentclass[reqno]{amsart}

David Carlisle

Then try running it with latex --shell-escape and it will list the directory, (unless you are on windows, in which case use ls not dir0

@OFFSHARING the class isn't relevant here

OFFSHARING

11:12 AM

@DavidCarlisle a stupid question (probably): how do I look in the log?

I use TeXworks.

@DavidCarlisle I think I know your point. Reading one of the files created after the lunch of the files.

LaTeX2e <2014/05/01>
Babel <3.9l> and hyphenation patterns for 68 languages loaded.
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\base\article.cls"
Document Class: article 2014/09/29 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\base\size10.clo"
File: size10.clo 2014/09/29 v1.4h Standard LaTeX file (size option)
)
\c@part=\count79
\c@section=\count80
\c@subsection=\count81
\c@subsubsection=\count82
\c@paragraph=\count83
\c@subparagraph=\count84
\c@figure=\count85
\c@table=\count86

Johannes_B

@OFFSHARING By the way, you could do an update ;-)

OFFSHARING

@Johannes_B hehe, true! :-)))

So, runsystem(ls)...disabled (restricted) means that there is nothing hidden, no hidden command like sending mails with the content of my tex file?

What does it mean "running it with latex --shell-escape "?

OK, I think I know how to do that. Let me see.

David Carlisle

@OFFSHARING it means the file tried to run the command ls you are on windows so change that to dir but that latex did not run the file. If you (or texworks for you) used pdflatex --shell-escape instead of pdflatex then teh command would have run and listed all the files in the folder. I hav eno idea how you tell texworks what commands to run, but somewhere you must have told it to use pdflatex rather then tex or luatex or MSword.

@OFFSHARING but the point is that system commands are disabled by default, the user (not the document author) has to enable them. If the user doesn't know how to do that that's a security improvement not a problem:-)

OFFSHARING

11:29 AM

@DavidCarlisle I mean I only used a single file I received, I didn't activate anything. I only hope that file won't send the content of my work to any mail address. This is the only concern.

@DavidCarlisle Then I shouldn't be concerned at all.

@DavidCarlisle Thank you a lot!

I simply don't have time to learn more latex, doing other things, I'm totally dedicated on a project, but after finishing it I'll spend some time learning more latex stuff.

egreg

11:50 AM

Herbert is –724 from 200K!

Paulo Cereda

@egreg yay!

Transcript for

TeX, LaTeX and Friends

$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends