Emacs compilation mode won't see bash alias

Question

Emacs M-x compile does not see any aliases set in .bashrc. If I use M-x shell then type the alias, it is fine. I tried sourcing .bashrc from /etc/profile, from ~/.profile, ~/bash_env, anything I can think of to no avail.

I am on Emacs 23 and Ubuntu 11. I start emacs using /usr/bin/emacs %F, from a desktop button.

Answer 1

Emacs inherits its environment from the parent process. How are you invoking Emacs - from the command line, or some other way?

What happens if you:

M-x compile RET C-a C-k bash -i -c your_alias RET

Invoking bash as an interactive shell (-i option) should read your .bashrc aliases.

Edit: I think both M-x shell-command and M-x compile execute commands in an inferior shell via call-process. Try the following in your .emacs (or just evaluate):

(setq shell-file-name "bash")
(setq shell-command-switch "-ic")

I notice that after evaluation of the above, .bashrc aliases are picked up for use by both M-x shell-command and M-x compile, i.e

M-x compile RET your_alias RET

should then work.

My environment: Emacs 24.1 (pretest rc1), OSX 10.7.3

Answer 2

Keith Flower's answer works but can result in some slowdowns due to .bashrc being unnecessarily loaded in other places (presumably many many times, my computer is not exactly under-powered but emacs was almost unusable when trying to use autocomplete.el).

An alternative way is to locally modify shell-command-switch only for the functions where it is needed. This can be done using emacs' "advice" feature to create a wrapper around those functions. Here's an example that modifies compile:

;; Define + active modification to compile that locally sets
;; shell-command-switch to "-ic".
(defadvice compile (around use-bashrc activate)
  "Load .bashrc in any calls to bash (e.g. so we can use aliases)"
  (let ((shell-command-switch "-ic"))
    ad-do-it))

You need to write similar "advice" for each function that you want to use .bashrc (e.g. I also needed to define the same advice for recompile), just copy the above and replace compile in the above with another function name.