Passing Emacs variables to minibuffer shell commands

Question

I can run a shell command quickly by hitting M-!. One thing I\'d like to do is perform shell quick operations on the current file. An example would be checking th

Answer 1

You can't do that with M-!, but you can evaluate arbitrary elisp from the minibuffer, so writing a function isn't strictly necessary:

M-: (shell-command (format "p4 edit %s" (shell-quote-argument buffer-file-name))) RET

In this case however, I think eshell is what you want to use:

M-x eshell-command RET p4 edit (eval buffer-file-name) RET

Edit: Except unfortunately that doesn't work, as the *eshell cmd* buffer is selected when that is evaluated. One solution would be:

M-x eshell-command RET p4 edit (eval buffer-file-name (other-buffer nil t)) RET

(Not quite as elegant, sorry.)