2

I have a shell script 

$ cat ~/foo.sh

#!/bin/bash

echo $1 $2

I'm trying to call this from emacs. My elisp function is 

(defun foo (word1 word2)
  "Print these two words."
  (interactive
   (list
    (read-string "Enter first word: ")
    (read-string "Enter second word: ")))
  (shell-command-to-string "bash ~/foo.sh %s %s" word1 word2))

This, however, yields an error. What am I doing wrong?

Drew
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Brian Fitzpatrick
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    "Yields an error" isn't terribly helpful. A good question quotes the exact error message. – phils Dec 21 '16 at 10:44

2 Answers2

3

C-hf will tell you that (shell-command-to-string COMMAND) is the general form for that function, so it is clear that (shell-command-to-string "bash ~/foo.sh %s %s" word1 word2) is not valid.

Use format as Håkon Hægland has shown, but you should always process your arguments with shell-quote-argument to ensure the formatted shell command is correct.

phils
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2

You can use format :

(defun foo (word1 word2)
  "Print these two words."
  (interactive
   (list
    (read-string "Enter first word: ")
    (read-string "Enter second word: ")))
  (shell-command-to-string (format "~/foo.sh %s %s" word1 word2)))
Håkon Hægland
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