Is there a way to get my emacs to recognize my bash aliases and custom functions when I run a shell command?

Question

In my shell environment I have aliases and custom functions. When I am in an instance of emacs (I always use emacs -nw) and I execute a shell command (M-!) I cannot use them. This makes sense since I imagine it launches it's own subshell to do these... but is there a way (maybe in my .emacs) to get this to work? Perhaps even if it involved sourcing an environment by default before executing any shell command given?

Answer 1

Below are my comments about what I think was a related question:

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

Source

Answer 2

Have a read through http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Bash-Startup-Files

For non-interactive shells, the only file that is sourced is the value of the BASH_ENV environment variable. You invoke emacs like BASH_ENV=~/.bashrc emacs if emacs will use bash for shell commands -- some programs specifically use "/bin/sh"