Re: piping through emacs from shell

[Kevin Rodgers]

Shaddin Doghmi wrote:

> I have an executable that makes some formatted parenthesized output to 
> stdout. The output from that executable is unindented and ugly, but 
> looks nice when indented in emacs latex mode. I have an indent-all 
> function defined in my .emacs that indents an entire buffer. Now, what i 
> want is for the executable to pipe its output through emacs somehow, and 
> get it back all indented nicely, without me actually interactively 
> opening up an emacs window and executing the indent-all function. is 
> there anyway i can "use" emacs uninteractively in a pipe like this?

Sure, but you'll have to use a temporary file:


make-formatted-parenthesized-output |
{
  cat > /tmp/unique-file-name &&
  emacs --batch /tmp/unique-file-name -f latex-mode -f indent-all -f save-buffer 
&&
  cat /tmp/unique-file-name
} |
do-something-with-indented-output

--
Kevin Rodgers