tlmgr search output

[Joseph Wright]

Hello all,

There was a question on TeX-sx yesterday about automatically determining
'CTAN' (TeX Live really) packages needed by a document. I started on a
script with the idea of being to use --recorder, parse the .fls file
then do a lookup for each line to list all of the TL packages needed.
That would be handy for anyone using a deliberately minimised TeX system.

However, I ran into the issue that

     tlmgr search --global --file <filename>

doesn't return anything I can use from a script - try e.g.

   print("FOUND " .. os.execute("tlmgr search --global --file article.cls")

from Lua.

It seems that --machine-readable doesn't work here, as it's not
implemented for the search command. Is there any way to get this
information from a script at present?

Regards,

Joseph