Pass text as argument to external program using emacs

Question

Let's say I have this text in a file:

/home is where the heart is.

If for example, I select the /home text, using C-spc, is there a way of sending it to ls, so that in the end if will execute ls /home? M-| does not work.

M-| is shell-command-on-region which pipes the current region into a command. That won't work. Victor's solution should solve your problem. — Noufal Ibrahim
– Noufal Ibrahim, Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 13:22

Victor Deryagin · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-27 15:26:46Z

5

As far as I know, there is no way to do that in Emacs directly. But everyting is possible with help of elisp:

(defun region-as-argument-to-command (cmd)
  (interactive "sCommand: ")
  (shell-command
   (format
    "%s %s"
    cmd
    (shell-quote-argument
     (buffer-substring (region-beginning)
                       (region-end))))))

edited Jul 27, 2011 at 15:26

answered Jul 27, 2011 at 11:48

Victor Deryagin

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1 Comment

Sean Over a year ago

You probably also want to apply shell-quote-argument to the second and third arguments to format, or else be careful never to call this function when the region text includes ;rm -rf /.

huaiyuan · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-27 14:01:12Z

5

Try M-| xargs ls. That is, pass "xargs ls" as the shell command on the region selected.

See xargs.

answered Jul 27, 2011 at 14:01

huaiyuan

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Comments

sanityinc · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-27 13:19:12Z

3

Victor's answer is a good one for the question you asked, but in your specific case you might consider using M-x ffap (find-file-at-point). This will give you a dired buffer for the /home directory.

answered Jul 27, 2011 at 13:19

sanityinc

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