Question

I do this kind of things very often (Every week) in Emacs when I restart it:

1. open a shell connecting to a RSH server, execute some commands, rename the buffer
2. repeat step1 for a few different remote machines

I was thinking: is there a way so that I can hard code these setups in the start-up scripts?

Answer 1

Here’s a function that starts a shell, ssh-es to a host, and runs a command before dropping into an interactive shell:

(defun start-remote-shell (host command)
  (shell (format "*shell-%s*" host))
  (sleep-for 0 500)  ; Wait half a second for the prompt to appear
  (insert (format "ssh -t %s %s'; exec bash -i'"
                  (shell-quote-argument host)
                  (shell-quote-argument (shell-quote-argument command))))
  (comint-send-input))

You can put this snippet into your .emacs file, followed by the specific calls you want, such as:

(start-remote-shell "server-one" "apache start")
(start-remote-shell "server-two" "mysql start")
(start-remote-shell "server-three" "foo start")