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I often use subordinate shells within Emacs. (I instantiate these shells with M-x shell.)

I put all these shells under auto-save-mode (through my shell-mode-hook; see below).

Is there some way that I can have Emacs set an environment variable in a subordinate shell equal to the value of buffer-auto-save-file-name?

For what it's worth, below is the hook code I use to put my subordinate shells under auto-save-mode:

;; NB: I define the global variable auto-saves-dir elsewhere in my init file. (defun cd-to-auto-saves-dir () (unless (file-directory-p auto-saves-dir) (make-directory auto-saves-dir t)) (cd auto-saves-dir)) (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook (lambda () ;; the silliness with cd-ing to/fro auto-saves-dir is the ;; only way I've found to trick Emacs into putting the ;; auto-save'd file in auto-saves-dir (let ((orig-dir default-directory)) (cd-to-auto-saves-dir) (auto-save-mode) (cd orig-dir)) ) )
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  • 1
    I hack comint-exec-1 to create a custom buffer-local process-environment containing the environmental variables that I like. You might want to consider doing something similar. Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 19:48
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    By the way, (let ((default-directory auto-saves-dir)) (auto-save-mode)) should work fine, assuming auto-saves-dir exists. Commented Mar 1, 2017 at 20:10

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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+50

After (re)reading the code of the shell function, here's what I'd do:

(advice-add 'make-comint-in-buffer :around #'my-enable-auto-save-in-shell) (defun my-enable-auto-save-in-shell (origfun procname &rest args) (if (not (equal procname "shell")) (apply origfun procname args) ;; Not a shell, nothing to do. ;; Enable auto-save-mode. (let ((default-directory auto-saves-dir)) (auto-save-mode)) ;; Pass the auto-save file name to the subprocess. (let ((process-environment `(,(concat "EMACS_AUTO_SAVE_FILE_NAME=" buffer-auto-save-file-name) . ,process-environment))) (apply origfun procname args))))
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You can use the with-environment-variables macro.

(let ((buffer-auto-save-file-name "test-file.txt")) (with-environment-variables (("BUFFER_AUTO_SAVE_FILE_NAME" buffer-auto-save-file-name)) (shell)))
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Add the following to the end of your lambda() routine:

(goto-char (point-max)) (insert (concat "export EMACS_AS_FILE=" buffer-auto-save-file-name))

The shell command to assign your variable will automatically appear on the command line; simply hit enter to set it.

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(let ((process-environment `(,(concat "BUFFER_AUTO_SAVE_FILE_NAME=" buffer-auto-save-file-name) ,@process-environment))) (shell))
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  • I don't think this will cut it because this uses the buffer-auto-save-file-name of the buffer from which we run shell not the value inside that buffer. Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 14:47
  • Yeah, right. 34 Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 16:25

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