Lua has access to the filesystem, but you probably want the luafilesystem module for general scripting, it provides more POSIX and Windows-specific functionalit

Lua has access to the filesystem, but you probably want the luafilesystem module for general scripting, it provides more POSIX and Windows-specific functionality. As a general rule, the Lua standard library only includes what can be portably built on the C standard library. Instead of "batteries included", Lua is small and portable everywhere ("travel light"), and makes it easy to wrap other functionality via the C API. Sometimes that's a problem, but sometimes it's exactly what you want - say, when Python would be too big a dependency, Lua is an excellent option. (No experience with MoonScript. I'm content with Lua's syntax. I much prefer it to Ruby's, for example.)