How to make Emacs use my .bashrc file?

Question

I need to use my $PATH in Emacs to run some commands. How can I make Emacs use it? I installed Emacs from Ubuntu repositories.

Answer 1

There are many Emacs packages that update $PATH environment variable and the 'exec-path'. That's because Emacs don't assume definitions in BASH related files, such as '~/.bashrc'.

All definitions you need to have in any program not executed from a terminal shell, must be moved to '~/.profile', these are loaded in the system startup.

Some old systems need to manually load user profile from '/etc/profile'.