Question

I want to string together some shell commands with && — for instance,

wget -c http://repository/file.tar.gz && tar -xzvf file.tar.gz && rm file.tar.gz

Normally I would use start-process, but this function seems to be confused by the &&. I can just run the three commands in sequence, but in this case as in many others, I want to ensure that the first command was not aborted in error before the second command executes, and so on.

Python’s subprocess.call function has a shell=True argument by which you can just send the whole line — is there such a function in emacs lisp, or in this case I should look for another workaround?

Answer 1

You probably want to use shell-command.