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-!

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

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