I have a shell script
$ cat ~/foo.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $1 $2
I'm trying to call this from emacs. My elisp function is
(defun foo (word1 word2)
"Print these two words."
(interactive
(list
(read-string "Enter first word: ")
(read-string "Enter second word: ")))
(shell-command-to-string "bash ~/foo.sh %s %s" word1 word2))
This, however, yields an error. What am I doing wrong?
You can use format :
(defun foo (word1 word2)
"Print these two words."
(interactive
(list
(read-string "Enter first word: ")
(read-string "Enter second word: ")))
(shell-command-to-string (format "~/foo.sh %s %s" word1 word2)))
C-hf will tell you that (shell-command-to-string COMMAND) is the general form for that function, so it is clear that (shell-command-to-string "bash ~/foo.sh %s %s" word1 word2) is not valid.
Use format as Håkon Hægland has shown, but you should always process your arguments with shell-quote-argument to ensure the formatted shell command is correct.
