Question

I’m trying to get a compile command (rake cucumber) to run with a specific ruby version on my Mac OS X system, I use rvm to do this currently in the terminal. My ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist has the correct path in it, but emacs insists on prepending to this path and therefore making it useless. I’ve also tried:

(when (equal system-type 'darwin)
  (setenv "PATH" (concat "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249%global/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin"))
  (push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin" exec-path)
  (push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin" exec-path)
  (push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin" exec-path)
  (push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249%global/bin" exec-path)
  (push "/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin" exec-path))

It was the desperate attempt of an emacs beginner to get what I wanted. It still prepends in front of it, so my path ends up being:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin:/Users/fearoffish/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249%global/bin

I don’t want /usr/bin and others prepending, I want my path first and the emacs prepended path to be at the end, I reckon this would fix my problem.

I test this by simply opening Aquamacs and running meta-x compile and then echo $PATH.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

A small modification to the solution by sanityinc (couldn’t find a way to enter it in the comments above — is that just me?)

• I use -l option to the shell to force a login shell (which reads .profile or .bash_profile), rather than an interactive shell (which only reads .bashrc).
• I do some string trimming on the returned path (as inspection shows a newline sneaking in).

Modified code:

(defun set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH ()
  (let ((path-from-shell 
      (replace-regexp-in-string "[[:space:]\n]*$" "" 
        (shell-command-to-string "$SHELL -l -c 'echo $PATH'"))))
    (setenv "PATH" path-from-shell)
    (setq exec-path (split-string path-from-shell path-separator))))
(when (equal system-type 'darwin) (set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH))