Commands from .bashrc not available in Emacs - emacs

I have some aliases and functions defined in ~/.bashrc.
I start emacs from a terminal window using emacs -nw
When I execute M-x shell-command, the aliases and functions from ~/.bashrc are not available, but give a "command not found".
I've googled quite a bit but all the posts I come across say, if I understand them correctly, that ~/.bashrc is the place where this should work (rather than ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile).
What am I missing?

Aliases are available only in interactive shell - a snapshot from bash man page:
Aliases are not expanded when the
shell is not interactive, unless the
expand_aliases shell option is set
using shopt
(see the description of shopt under SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below).

If you start Emacs from an interactive shell (in which .bashrc, etc. have executed), then the commands from your .bashrc should be available for both shell-command and shell, at least that's how it works for me.
But yeah as the other answer says, there is not real way to get a .bashrc environment in emacs. There are some documentation about a .emacs_bash file, but that never worked for me.
Okay misread your question here. If you are looking for functions and aliases instead of commands by changing paths in .bashrc, the non-interactiveness is the problem. I guess you can change the default argument to shell-command (take a look at explicit-bash-args) to make bash interactive, but that probably has unintended consequences.

The accepted answer correctly states that "aliases are available only in interactive shell".
This means that in order to load (rightly located indeed) aliases from ~/.bashrc, an interactive shell would have to be launched with Emacs's M-x shell-command (M-!).
To achieve this, add -i (interactive) switch to the M-x shell-command with:
(setq shell-command-switch "-ic")
Side Note, not Emacs related:
On some operating systems users would need to add the line source ~/.bashrc to ~/.bash_profile (or similar), since ~/.bashrc is not always auto-read by a system.

Related

emacs --daemon with --batch and input file

I would like to create a script that simply cleans up the whitespace and tabs on several files in a folder for me. I have created a bash file with among other things:
emacsclient -t -e '(progn (prelude-cleanup-buffer-or-region) (save-buffer-kill-terminal))' $FILE
Now this doesn't seem to work as it interprets ALL the file arguments as functions to be run (so $FILE is executed as a function). (P.S. prelude-cleanup-buffer-or-region is from here)
Now what I really want appears to be --batch described here (since I don't actually want to display anything on the screen) but this isn't one of the options of emacsclient. The reason I want to use emacsclient rather than just using emacs --batch is that I have a lot of startup files so want all of this to stay loaded otherwise my script would take too long.
Does anyone have any advice on how to go about this?
Thanks in advance.
emacsclient -e means evaluate lisp forms, do not edit files
from the man page
-e, --eval
do not visit files but instead evaluate the arguments as Emacs
Lisp expressions.
I guess you could add a (find-file "file") to your list of forms to execute
I just tried this snippet -
/opt/local/bin/emacsclient -e '(progn (find-file "./tmpfoo")
(end-of-buffer) (insert "ffff") (save-buffer))'
and it edits the file silently like you'd expect.
you could use shell globbing and a script to expand an argument filename into the list of forms.
do not run with the -t switch either, -e doesn't expect to have a persistent editor window, and you don't need the kill-terminal. The client will just run your elisp and exit.
I think I would probably write a lisp function that took a filename argument, that I loaded into emacs at startup time, and then just call that with a filename via emacsclient,
e.g. FILENAME="somefile"; emacsclient -e "(now-do-my-thing $FILENAME)"

How to stop Emacs from rendering junk characters in shell?

In my emacs shell, I see this output:
^[[J~% echo $PS1
%2c%%
On my other machine, this stuff doesn't show up at all. Can anyone suggest a reason why and how to fix it?
It's related to your PS1 setting. Basically Emacs will not accept TOO fancy settings of PS1. I used the following code in ~/.bashrc to distinguish PS1 between xterm and other term simulators such as Emacs. You can give it a try.
case $TERM in
xterm)
export PS1='\[\e]0;\u#\h: \W\a\]\[\e[31;1m\]\w\n\[\e[0m\]'
;;
*)
export PS1='\[\e[31;1m\]\w\n\[\e[0m\]'
;;
esac

How to view man pages using emacs when invoking man command in command line?

I would like to view man pages using emacs when invoking man command.
I modified the pager parameter in /etc/man.conf PAGER to emacs.
But, it doesn't work. Is there anything I should modify ?
Indeed, emacs cannot read STDIN into a buffer, meaning
cat foobar | emacs
does not work in any case. So setting your PAGER variable to 'emacs', or 'emacs -nw' does not do the job.
Only way around I see is to write the man output into a tmp-file and then load that file into emacs:
man find > tmp-file; emacs tmp-file
You could alias this.
For example, assuming a tc-shell, and a directory called 'tmp' in your home-path, you can put the following line into your ~/.tcshrc file:
alias man '/usr/bin/man \!* > ~/tmp/tmp-file; emacs ~/tmp/tmp-file; rm ~/tmp/tmp-file'
So next time you call man find, emacs will fire up.
Emacs has a "Man mode", which can be invoked by M-x man RET and then typing in your command.
You can profit from emacs's function man. Just define a function in bash that will run emacs that will call it:
function man () {
emacs -e '(man "'"$1"'")'
}
You might want to call emacs -nw or even emacsclient instead.

Emacs: Tramp doesn't work

I tried to open a remote file via Emacs via Tramp.
(require 'tramp)
(setq tramp-default-method "ssh")
I get a message from Emacs
Tramp: Waiting for prompts from remote shell
Emacs hung and did not respond to any action after that
Emacs was installed on Windows; the remote file was on a Linux machine.
If the account you're connecting to uses some weird fancy shell prompt, then there is a good chance that this is what makes tramp trip.
Log in as root, then enter
PS1="> "
(that's a normal, standard shell (ZSH, BASH, younameit) prompt, one that tramp will understand)
then switch to the user account, and launch emacs -q (to make sure that your .emacs is not causing this mess) and try to C-x C-f /sudo:root#localhost:/etc/hosts and see what's what.
You can (not recommended) also customize the regexp that defines what tramp expects :
M-x customize-variable RET tramp-terminal-prompt-regexp
My approach :
Make sure the variable tramp-terminal-type is set to "dumb"
M-x customize-variable RET tramp-terminal-type
Test that in your .*shrc and serve the correct prompt :
case "$TERM" in
"dumb")
PS1="> "
;;
xterm*|rxvt*|eterm*|screen*)
PS1="my fancy multi-line \n prompt > "
;;
*)
PS1="> "
;;
esac
Your Windows ssh client is the key here, and the 'ssh' Tramp method is almost certainly wrong.
If you're using Cygwin, then you need to use the 'sshx' method, and you probably need to use ssh-agent to handle authentication. Details are here:
Using tramp with EmacsW32 and cygwin, possible?
I imagine the same applies to any stand-alone ssh client which does not require a full Cygwin installation, but does use the Cygwin DLLs. (I mention this, because I'm pretty sure I remember seeing such a thing.)
If you're using PuTTY then you want the 'plink' method, as Alex Ott pointed out. If the Wiki doesn't suffice, a search here will probably turn up solutions for configuring that approach.
Other alternatives I can suggest are:
Use the Cygwin-native Emacs. That will be slower than NTEmacs, but Tramp seems to work well with the 'ssh' method, and password-prompting works as well.
Host a Linux VM on your Windows box, and run Emacs on that. That's a fairly large hoop to jump through, but it's my preferred way of using Tramp when working in Windows.
Well, this is a defect of tramp.
The real solution is to prevent loading .bashrc when tramp is used. (because now it is PS1, but it can be PATH, or any other thing that your .bashrc will do that will displease tramp...).
This can be done by asking ssh to set an environment variable, and testing it in .bashrc:
Add this to ~/.emacs:
(require 'tramp-sh nil t)
(setf tramp-ssh-controlmaster-options (concat "-o SendEnv TRAMP=yes " tramp-ssh-controlmaster-options))
and that at the beginning of ~/.bashrc:
if [ ! -z ${TRAMP-x} ] ; then
return
fi
Another default of tramp is that it doesn't have a variable to pass random arguments to the ssh command, we have to piggy-back on tramp-ssh-controlmaster-options.
Had you checked Emacs wiki for solution? ssh is in PATH? It's also recommended to use plink on MS Windows - see section "Inline methods" in Tramp documentation
If the problem is your fancy custom prompt in the remote shell, an easy workaround is to add to your .bashrc or equivalent:
if [[ $TERM == "dumb" ]]; then
export PS1="$ "
fi
After you define your PS1.
Note: the credit goes to ChasingLogic as this is their suggestion in this thread.
By the way -- if You need tramp to sudo -- You can actually sudo without tramp using sudoedit.
Currently I'm using this bash function:
erf () { SUDO_EDITOR="emacsclient -a emacs" sudoedit $#; }

How do I get the "Command Buffer" in Solaris 10?

When working on a linx CShell u get the option to press the up / down arrows to select the last command/s typed or the Command Buffer. This even works on Windows.
However this is not functional when working on Solaris, to which i recently switched. I am guessing that the shell is also a CShell.
Please tell me what key combination is required to have this feature on Solaris ?
The default shell in Solaris has command history, but you can also use Bash instead, it's more user friendly. Just type 'bash' (no quotes) at the command line. You can also edit /etc/passwd to make bash your default shell.
The "official" default shell for Solaris is actually sh, the original Bourne shell (see Chapter 10 of the Advanced User Guide for Solaris for more info). If you'd like to change it to csh or tcsh—and you're not root (it's generally considered bad practice to use anything but sh as root's default)—just issue passwd -e /path/to/shell_of_your_choice <loginname>. I'm guessing this would probably look like passwd -e /bin/csh <loginname>, but you'd probably want to make sure it exists, first.
It may be that it's the Korn shell in which case try <ESC>k.
bash at least will allow you to switch modes with "set -o vi" or "set -o emacs".
Maybe you can use the !! command, to repeat the previous one.
Use "echo $SHELL" to see what your login shell is. If it's ksh or bash, try "set -o emacs". If that works, you'll be able to use ^P to go back a command. ^R lets you search for a command, ^F and ^B to move around within the command.
If you can´t change your default shell, or you just want to try out one that works, you can kick off any other shell from your command line. I recommend you tcsh, which will have good command line editing and history using the arrow keys. Type /bin/tcsh at your prompt to try it out. You can use the earlier responses to change your default shell if you like tcsh. Make sure your have the following in your $HOME/.cshrc file:
set filec
set history=1000 # or some other large number
set autologout=0 # if you are logging in remotely under your account.
I hope this helps.
You enable history temporarily if you use BASH by typing
HISTSIZE=1000
which will enable up and down keys and store 1000 commands. After termal disconnetion all history will be gone.
This works on solaris 10.
For permanent solution add these lines to ~/.bashrc
HISTSIZE=1000
HISTFILESIZE=1000