Strange behaviour of sudo and eshell

[Aleš Bizjak]

Recently, sudo has stopped working in eshell with the error being

~ $ sudo ls

Variable binding depth exceeds max-specpdl-size

~ $ 

I had tried to find out what is the source of presumably, some loop, but couldn't find out exactly, but quite by accident, I noticed that sudo starts working if I load tramp (as in (require 'tramp)). It doesn't matter if it is loaded before or after loading eshell.

So this is what I do now to get sudo working, but I am curious why this happens. If I recall correctly, although I haven't used eshell much at that point, sudo used to work without this a few versions back. The only other configuration of eshell I have is

(require 'eshell)

(setq eshell-cmpl-ignore-case t

      eshell-cmpl-cycle-completions nil)

which I believe shouldn't interfere. This happens with a few recent pretests. The latest I have installed is

GNU Emacs 24.2.93.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.13)

compiled from source. 

-- Best, Aleš