Question

I would like to write a few Unix scripts in Emacs Lisp. However, there doesn’t seem to be a clean way to write to STDOUT so I can redirect the results to a file or pipe the output to another command. The print function places double quotes around the output strings so I get “Hello world!” instead of Hello world!.

Here’s the emacs script.

#!/usr/bin/emacs --script
;;
;; Run me from a Unix shell: ./hello.el > x.txt
;;
(message "Hello world!  I'm writing to STDERR.")
(print "Hello world!  I'm writing to STDOUT but I'm in quotes")
(insert "Hello world!  I'm writing to an Emacs buffer")
(write-file "y.txt")

And here’s how I would like to call it.

hello.el > x.txt
hello.el | wc

Answer 1

Seems like you want princ instead of print. So, basically:

(princ "Hello world! I'm writing to STDOUT but I'm not in quotes!")

However, one caveat is that princ does not automatically terminate the output with \n.