[Tex/LaTex] Equivalent to TeXLive’s –restricted-shell-escape for MiKTeX

miktexmintedSecurityshell-escapewindows

I often work on Windows, so need to use MiKTeX. I recently found the minted package, which needs to call the external command pygmentize. I currently call xelatex with the -shell-escape option to support this, but I'd rather not give malicious latex files complete access to my system. TeXLive has the --restricted-shell-escape option, which is what I want, but it doesn't seem to be available on MiKTeX. I did find a passing reference to --shell-restricted, but I don't know if that's what I want, and if it is what I want I don't know how to use it.

Is --shell-restricted a way to tell XeLaTeX to run pygmentize but not del /F /S /Q C:\*.*? If so, how do I use it? If not, is there such a way and how do I use it? If you can, could you also link me to the official documentation on the subject?

Best Answer

MiKTeX includes the option --restrict-write18 to allow a restricted set of commands to be run: this is enabled by default with an up-to-date MiKTeX. However, to allow this to work with minted there are two additional issues. First, you need to add pygmentize to the list of allowed commands: a separate question on this (probably for the 'general case') would be best. Secondly, minted checks for fully-enabled \write18 before it will even run: circumventing this would require a modified version of the package or a request to the package author to change the code.

As an aside, TeX Live runs fine on Windows, but of course you'd still have to deal with the two caveats.

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