Commands from .bashrc not available in Emacs

Question

I have some aliases and functions defined in ~/.bashrc.

I start emacs from a terminal window using emacs -nw

When I execute M-x shell-command, the aliases and functions from ~/.bashrc are not available, but give a "command not found".

I've googled quite a bit but all the posts I come across say, if I understand them correctly, that ~/.bashrc is the place where this should work (rather than ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile).

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Aliases are available only in interactive shell - a snapshot from bash man page:

Aliases are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless the expand_aliases shell option is set using shopt (see the description of shopt under SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below).

Answer 2

If you start Emacs from an interactive shell (in which .bashrc, etc. have executed), then the commands from your .bashrc should be available for both shell-command and shell, at least that's how it works for me.

But yeah as the other answer says, there is not real way to get a .bashrc environment in emacs. There are some documentation about a .emacs_bash file, but that never worked for me.

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Okay misread your question here. If you are looking for functions and aliases instead of commands by changing paths in .bashrc, the non-interactiveness is the problem. I guess you can change the default argument to shell-command (take a look at explicit-bash-args) to make bash interactive, but that probably has unintended consequences.