Hi, Corinna et al, On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 4:53 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote: M-x shell is specifically designed to spawn an interactive process like a shell. The bash subprocess starts, but it accepts no input. Here is the output of ps for that process: S 1740 252 1740 268 pty1 1003 08:10:54 /usr/bin/bash I think it's only commands requiring a tty, but that's the whole point of M-x shell mode. There is a separate command - M-x shell-command - which is designed to run and capture the output of individual commands like "ls" or "echo". That works fine. BTW, if I try to spawn gdb as a shell, the behavior is similar, but this time the process looks like this: 3328 3248 3328 3408 pty2 1003 08:15:18 /usr/bin/gdb <defunct> HTH. You mean a simpler test case than XEmacs? That seems like a low bar. :-) I'll try. Meanwhile, I've been looking at the emacs code (which in this case is simpler) to see if I can figure out how it is that M-x shell works there. Thank you! - Vin _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta