Why does does os.execute not work?
You have copy or xcopy on windows.
os.execute would work, but writing hacky workarounds per operating system isn't the most ideal solution.
Also for larger junks it makes often sense to use tar -c | tar -x or cpio to do the copy.
Under a few circumstances this can be significantly faster.
Are these available as a default on Windows?
From a quick google search, apparently not.
I'm not sure how large of a chunk you mean.
I don't expect to move anything greater than two megs per file.
Btw. for Windows there is a "run" utility available which can suppress the console window.
I never see a console window in the windows emulator even when I want one. Can't run murgaLua or any command line for windows in emulation, even the command prompt replacement program won't take keyboard input, I'm guess because of some Windows OS dependency that can't be emulated because there is no actual Windows OS installed.
When one can use simple pure lua or LFS commands to lock, create, or delete directories and files, does it make any sense to not be able to do the same with moving some files?
It certainly doesn't make any sense to wait four minutes for ten megs of files to copy on a 1ghz machine.
At any rate I put an email into the Kepler project about this.
Maybe they will update with something more than windows only features in the next release.