Run a shell command as lisp

Question

When I write, for example, (format "The value is %d." fill-column) and type C-c p after it, it outputs a result.

How could I do the same with a shell command? That is, to run a shell command within a emacs buffer in org-mode and insert the result in the same buffer?

Answer 1

Interactively, C-u M-! (i.e., shell-command with the universal argument prefix) will prompt you for a shell command and insert the output in the current buffer.

To do this from elisp code, see the comment from @lawlist

org-mode also has fairly sophisticated methods of its own for evaluating code, including both inline code and code blocks. First, you need to activate the languages you wish to use by setting the variable org-babel-load-languages. For bash scripts, you need to activate the language sh. After that, you can refer to bash code inline, as src_sh{<your code>}, or in separate code blocks:

#+BEGIN_SRC bash
<your code here>
#+END_SRC

You can then have the results of evaluating the code by typing C-c C-c while point is in the block. The result looks like this:

Here's an inline call to ~pwd~: src_sh{pwd} {{{results(=/home/tws/scratch=)}}}

And here's a short bash script as a code block:

#+BEGIN_SRC bash
ls
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
| clean-defun.el |
| find           |
| helm-test.el   |
| helm-test.el~  |
| #tmp.org#      |
| tmp.org        |
| tmp.org~       |
| tmp.pwd        |
| tmp.R          |
| tmp.R~         |
| tmp.txt        |
| tmp.txt~       |

See its manual (org) Evaluating code blocks for more details.