Re: "source" shell commands

[Matthew Flaschen]

Barry Margolin wrote:
> In article <85wt16btg5.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:
>>
>>> Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen@gatech.edu> writes:
>>>
>>>> Is there an elisp function to "source" a shell file; i.e. an
>>>> alternative to:
>>>>
>>>> (shell-command (concat "source \"" (expand-file-name "~/.rc") "\""))
>>> Sure.
>>>
>>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>>> (defun mf-source (file)
>>>   (interactive "f")
>>>   (shell-command (concat "source \"" file "\"")))
>>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>> Quoting is always good for trouble.  I'd rather use
>>
>> (defun mf-source (file)
>>   (interactive "f")
>>   (call-process shell-file-name nil nil nil "source" file))
>>
>> assuming that you don't care about the output.
> 
> First of all, shells don't take a command line to execute as arguments.  
> Take a look at what happens if you try it from the command line:
> 
> $ bash source .bashrc
> source: source: No such file or directory
> 
> You can do it with the -c option, but then they expect the command to be 
> in a single argument:
> 
> (call-process shell-file-name nil nil nil 
>               "-c" (format "source '%s'" file))
> 
> Second, the point of "sourcing" is to execute the commands in the 
> current process's context.  Since call-process and shell-command both 
> execute a child process, nothing that occurs in the sourced script will 
> have any effect on the emacs process.  So even if you get the syntax 
> right, it won't do anything different from executing the script normally.

Thanks.  I realized this after I asked the question.  Is there any way I
could import the variables after?  I found
shell-copy-environment-variable but I reall want to copy *all* of them
(for when I start emacs from outside the shell).

Matt Flaschen