[h-e-w] Re: M-x shell not working

[Jeffery B. Rancier]

Benjamin Riefenstahl <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden (Jeffery B. Rancier) writes:
>> I don't recall ever changing this, but bash doesn't seem to be
>> working from within Emacs.  Here's what I get:
>>
>> ,----
>> | bash-2.05b$ 
>> | : command not found
>> | bash-2.05b$ pwd
>> | : command not found
>> | bash-2.05b$ exit
>> | : command not found
>> | bash-2.05b$ 
>> `----
>
> This looks like bash is reading from stding in binary mode and Emacs
> is feeding it DOS-style input.  Indeed I get the same effect, if I
> explicitly use (set-buffer-process-coding-system 'latin-1-dos
> 'latin-1-dos).  Check your variables default-process-coding-system,
> process-coding-system-alist and similar stuff.

Thanks Benny.  That got me down the right path.
process-coding-system-alist was set to nil, and
default-process-coding-system was set:

,----[ C-h v default-process-coding-system RET ]
| default-process-coding-system's value is 
| (iso-latin-1-dos . iso-latin-1-dos)
| 
| 
| Documentation:
| Cons of coding systems used for process I/O by default.
| The car part is used for decoding a process output,
| the cdr part is used for encoding a text to be sent to a process.
`----

So, given the following:

,----
| (setq shell-file-name "bash")
`----

I set the following in my .emacs, and that seemed to do the trick.
Does that sound right for a Windows system using cygwin bash?

,----
| (setq process-coding-system-alist
|       (cons '("bash" . latin-1-unix) process-coding-system-alist))
`----

-- 
Thanks,
Jeff