[h-e-w] SHELL environment variable and the cmdproxy

[Denis Howe]

On Mon, 2012-02-27 19:00:49 +0100, Bo Johansson wrote:

> The environment variable SHELL has in (my) emacs at start up the value 
> "C:/Program Files (x86)/GNU Emacs 23.4/bin/cmdproxy.exe". In the Windows 
> command shell it is not defined.

Thanks to Bo for a great post about an issue keeps biting me.  As Bo
points out, Emacs' SHELL environment variable breaks some external
processes (e.g. installing Perl modules), so why set it?  Setting it
to cmdproxy, the default on Windows, will cause other programs running
in an Emacs subshell to use cmdproxy as a "sh" replacement.  Then if
they try to do  "sh -c 'myprog foo bar' ",  it will eventually become
something like  "cmd /c myprog foo bar".  Clearly only Unix ports
running on Windows would benefit.  Are there any examples where this
SHELL variable setting actually helps?

My .emacs now removes SHELL from process-environment, which seems to
work for me.

--
Denis Howe <address@hidden>
http://foldoc.org/
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