Is it possible to write to the filesystem from a lua script?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

What I had in mind was writing a playlist script named something like zzzzzzzzzz.lua. As I understand it, since it would come last (alphabetical order) it would be ignored if any other scripts matched. If all the others failed to match, this script would be written to return true on the probe no matter what though. Inside, it would look for a single tag, something like:

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<meta name="videolan-playlist" href="/path/to/lua-playlist.lua"/>

And if it found such a tag, it'd go ahead and prompt the user to install that script (well, I think dialog is turned off for everything but extensions, but you get the idea).

I can't find anything in the READMEs about filesystem access though, not even to say that it is only possible in extensions. Where should I be looking?

[mark_]

yes, you can use the os and file and io functions listed here:
http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I'm having no luck with that. I've tried the following code inside of a playlist script:

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fh = io.open('test.txt', "w") fh:write("test is a test") fh:flush() fh:close()

I was expecting it to attempt to create a file somewhere within VLC's own directory tree, but it's nowhere to be found. However, the statements after this execute perfectly... throws no errors or warnings. I can't find any scripts in the VLC source either that make use of this either.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Mark,

Turns out you were right. I can write to the filesystem... it's just that when I run it from the term it was writing to my home directory. When running from the dock, it'd drop things in root. So I have to qualify the filename with an absolute path, but I've yet to figure out how to determine which OS I'm on (hoping to find the playlist directory so that I can have my playlist script update itself).