Re: Reasons for Switching to Eshell

[Tim X]

poppyer <poppyer@gmail.com> writes:

> Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Dear All,
>> I am slowly discovering new features in emacs and I found out it has
>> its own shell (eshell).
>> Now, I wonder if it is a good investment to learn how to use it. I
>> found tons of tutorials online (BTW: any recommendation to start me
>> out?), but I am missing the big picture.
>> I suppose that eshell must be perfectly integrated with emacs, but
>> other than that are there reasons to give it preference with respect
>> to .e.g BASH?
>> Many thanks
>>
>> Lorenzo
>>
>>
>
> I think one big problem is that ESHELL doesn't support input
> redirection, such as: a.out < input.txt

Yes, I've been stung by this one. Ran a script that used wget to get
data from a remote site and then display it in the terminal. When run
under eshell, you don't get any output because wget was using the '-' to
redirect the data to stdout. The problem or danger is that you may run a
program that is in fact a script that relies on redirection and you
won't get the result you expect. 

Bottom line, running a script under eshell may not give you the results
you expect and is therefore a bit misleading. For manipulating files and
moving around directories, it is great as you get all that added emacs
goodies, but I'd be very careful about running scripts.

Tim



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tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au