CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosbashemacsapplescript
aresnick
aresnick

Reputation: 1635

How can I open Emacs on Mac OS X such that it is loaded with my $PATH?

I'm running Snow Leopard, and trying to run Emacs such that when I start it up, the output of (getenv "PATH") is the same as the output in Terminal.app of echo $PATH.

In other words, I want to start up Emacs from /Applications/Emacs.app and have it start with my $PATH. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this within emacs, or with how I start emacs up. So I've spent most of my effort trying to come up with a shell script that I can wrap with something like Platypus or Appify.

So the closest thing I have right now is:

echo MYPASSWD | sudo -S -u USERNAME -i nohup /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs > /dev/null &

which fails because it seems that nohup throws away my $PATH, despite the -i flag. The following does not throw away my PATH but open a superfluous Terminal.app:

echo MYPASSWD | sudo -S -u USERNAME -i open /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs > /dev/null &

I've tried running this through do shell script in an AppleScript, also to no avail.

Am I missing something basic? It doesn't seem like this should be hard. Thanks!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1123

Answers (4)

prideout
prideout

Reputation: 3019

I ran into the same problem and here's how I worked around it. I created ~/.bashrc and populated it with:

source /etc/profile
source ~/.profile

Upvotes: 1

jlf
jlf

Reputation: 3539

I wrote a little elisp a while ago to parse the output of env and apply it to the Emacs environment because I didn't want to maintain a plist. The code's at http://paste.lisp.org/display/111574.

Upvotes: 2

ohmantics
ohmantics

Reputation: 1819

GUI applications are not launched by a traditional shell and do not inherit environment variables from the usual places like .profile, .bash_profile, etc.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/EnvironmentVars.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/20002093-BCIJIJBH explains that ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist is the place you probably want to add your favorite equivalent of $PATH.

Upvotes: 2

finfet
finfet

Reputation: 226

You have to export the PATH to the location of the .app so it would be something like this

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/the/program

That should allow you to just type EMACS and it will start up.

Upvotes: 0

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