Yes. But if you just want bare Lua, you want bare stdio. You want a popen that goes one way. You want no mechanism for even running another program safely: an array of args. You need to step outside Lua if your ambitions are higher.
I have been stuck in Python for a bit, and sometimes I just want those damn batteries. Cloned. In Lua. Without two or three separate posix libraries, network libraries, XML libra...well...Python is hardly perfect either.
Jay
