which shell-command in emacs lisp?

Question

If I am trying to run a shell-command in an Emacs Lisp function in which I call rsync (or scp) multiple times, which shell-command variant should I use? I am currently using shell-command, which locks up Emacs until the process is done, and the output that should be visible with the --verbose to rsync is not printed; I can use shell-command with an & at the end of the command string to make it asynchronous, which does print the progress — but while it doesn't "lock up" Emacs entirely, the minibuffer repeatedly asks if I want to kill the process which is crippling in the meantime; and start-process-shell-command, which appears to halt the function only after the first file/directory is transferred; neglecting the rest when there are multiple rsync calls made through my function. None of these seem ideal, any hints?

Have you read gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/… ? — Anders Lindahl
– Anders Lindahl, Commented Sep 21, 2009 at 11:44

Jonathan Arkell · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-21 16:55:41Z

13

I have had the most success using start-process myself.

(start-process "process-name" 
               (get-buffer-create "*rsync-buffer*") 
               "/path/to/rsync"
               arg1
               ...
               argn)

This will send all the output to a single buffer.

answered Sep 21, 2009 at 16:55

Jonathan Arkell

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Clément · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-07 22:10:26Z

5

One solution might be to run the command in an actual shell buffer. Then you get to choose which one of those to run:

M-x shell
M-x eshell
M-x term

If you like that idea, you can code it up like this:

(defun my-rsync-routine ()
  "run some rsync processes"
  (with-temp-buffer
    (shell (current-buffer))
    (process-send-string nil "rsync ...")
    (process-send-string nil "rsync ...")
    (process-send-string nil "rsync ...")))

Read more on 'process-send-string for its usage. You might also want to have some error checking on the output from the processes.

edited Sep 7, 2015 at 22:10

Clément

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answered Sep 21, 2009 at 13:02

Trey Jackson

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1 Comment

hatmatrix Over a year ago

Hello Trey, thank you always. This time I had to choose with Jonathan's solution but as it was direct and well-suited for this purpose (and process-send-string seemed to work only in a buffer created and explicitly referenced (with get-buffer-create) rather than in temp-buffer...) but I am reading up on the filtering functions... there is much to grok and I am sure I will find uses at the end of it. Thank you again.

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