Hello all, Following some discussion at TUG2018, the team have added an experimental package, l3sys-shell, to the l3experimental bundle. This package provides platform-agnostic interfaces to common file/system operations, for example file copying. These only work if shell escape is enabled: they will be blocked by the TeX system otherwise but in any case are set up as macro-level no-ops. There are two broad questions we have. First, how do people feel about these concepts? We can see that there may be some security concerns, hence not adding directly to the expl3 core. However, as one has to be running with unrestricted shell escape anyway, we are not sure if providing macro wrappers makes these worse: a suitably-motivated person could after all write their own malicious code in this area. How do people see this? (Note that existing packages already set up their own file copying/deletion/etc.) The second is more tightly focussed on the two (relatively) 'safe' operations, getting the absolute path of the working directory, and listing all files in a given directory. Both of these could be done without unrestricted shell escape given a suitable 'wrapper' layer. Would this be worth pursuing? Joseph