We need this only because Lua's stdlib is so scarce. Lua doesn't intend
to include a complete stdlib - they confine themselves to standard C,
both for portability reasons and to keep the code minimal. But standard
C does not provide much either.
It would be possible to use Lua POSIX wrapper libraries, but that would
be a messy (and unobvious) dependency. It's better to implement the
missing functions ourselves, as long as they're small in number.
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