I fully agree with you but just want to add that you can do it in "pure" Lua : for file in io.popen("ls "..dir):lines() do ... end This should never be used

I fully agree with you but just want to add that you can do it in "pure" Lua : for file in io.popen("ls "..dir):lines() do ... end This should never be used in real applications and a proper filesystem module should be used instead. But, I find it very useful for quick one-shot scripts I write for batch processing some files.