[tex-live] kpsewhich

[Thomas Esser]

> When using kpsewhich, there is a dependency on the OS

It is not kpsewhich which causes this, it is the call to execute a shell
command and the underlying interpreter which causes these differences.

You could easily wrap the different $ of the shells by wrapping things
in a quotevar  function, so that you could write
  kpsewhich -expand-var quotevar('$SELFAUTOPARENT')
everywhere.

> portable. So, i wonder if it's possible to make kpsewhich in this respect 
> platform independent.

kpsewhich *is* platform independent. The underlying shells are not...
If you write a C program which calls execl(), you'll see that there is
no difference in parsing the $.

Thomas