Re: Shell aliases as shell-commands

[Sebastian Tennant]

Quoth Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>:
> In article <mailman.5330.1232446602.26697.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
>  Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com> wrote:
>
>> Quoth Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE>:
>> > Am 20.01.2009 um 10:09 schrieb Sebastian Tennant:
>> >
>> >> It's 'M-x shell-command' I'm thinking about.
>> >
>> > Forget it!  Shell-command is not meant for interactive use as in a
>> > shell with aliases and such comfort.
>> 
>> But my aliases are so handy!!! I want them (without having to run an
>> interactive shell), and Emacs can give them to me, I know it can :)
>
> Can you define them as functions instead of aliases?

The issue was over instructing the shell to source my ~/.bashrc (which
contains both aliases and functions).

I mistakenly thought that the way to get a shell to read init files was
to specify a login shell (bash -l -c <command>), but that isn't the way
to do it, rather, you should force interactive behaviour with the '-i'
switch (bash -i -c <command>).  Do this and all your aliases and
functions are to hand.

Here are the two functions I posted to emacs.sources that force
interactive shells and put all your aliases and function defs at your
fingertips.

 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.sources/3147

The previous post (3146) contains a little bit of explanation but don't
use the code from 3146 or you'll break shell-command (slightly).

If you have lots of aliases and functions you'd like to access via

  M-! <command>

you may like to rebind M-! to interactive-shell-command, like so:

 (global-set-key "M-!" 'interactive-shell-command)

Sebastian