Emacs shell command not found

Question

I work on Mac OS X 10.5.8. I am trying to learn emacs. I am very new to it and today tried to enter shell commands from within emacs. I entered pdflatex filename. However, it gives me an error saying

/bin/bash: pdflatex: command not found

I have LaTeX installed and pdflatex works fine from the command line in the terminal.

I get a similar error for a command lsd that I have defined in my .bash_profile file. This works fine too on the command line in the terminal.

The command ls works fine in the emacs shell.

Does anyone have an idea what might be happening.

How I can get emacs to recognize all the commands that work fine on the command line in the terminal. Is there anyway I can make the environment used by emacs shell and terminal command line identical? If so, is there any reason you would recommend against doing so? I know very little of both bash and emacs.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

It's possible that the Emacs shell is working in a different environment from the one you have at the terminal command line. Compare the output of env when run inside the Emacs shell and when run in the terminal. Pay particular attention to the values of PATH.

Answer 2

From help for shell command:

Program used comes from variable ‘explicit-shell-file-name’, or (if that is nil) from the ESHELL environment variable, or (if that is nil) from ‘shell-file-name’. If a file ‘~/.emacs_SHELLNAME’ exists, or ‘~/.emacs.d/init_SHELLNAME.sh’, it is given as initial input (but this may be lost, due to a timing error, if the shell discards input when it starts up). The buffer is put in Shell mode, giving commands for sending input and controlling the subjobs of the shell. See ‘shell-mode’. See also the variable ‘shell-prompt-pattern’.

So you can just create symlink ~/.emacs_bash (for bash) or ~/.emacs_zsh (for zsh). Alternatively set variable explicit-shell-file-name to point to ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc whichever you use or you can play which ESHELL environment variable as well.

Answer 3

According to the following article. If you launch emacs from a shell, it will inherit the shell's environment variables. Therefore, just launch emacs from whatever shell you are most comfortable with to automatically set the environment variables. For example:

cd /file_path
emacs file_name