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I know about shell-command-on-region.

Is there any way to pipe a region through a non-shell command? The start-process and call-process functions invoke executables directly, without using the shell. I'd like to avoid shell overhead when piping the contents of a region into an external command, as well.

Can this be done in emacs?

Thanks in advance.

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  • Please do not cross-post the same question to SO and emacs.SE. Choose one or the other. Thx.
    – Drew
    Commented Dec 3, 2016 at 0:12
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    What overhead do you perceive? What platform are you using? shell-command-on-region ends up calling call-process-region with the variable shell-file-name as the command.
    – icarus
    Commented Dec 3, 2016 at 0:16
  • Yes, I know that the shell-file-name program is used to invoke the command. If I invoke call-process with "/usr/bin/wc", the shell (for example, perhaps /bin/sh) is invoked, and then it goes ahead and calls /usr/bin/wc. The "overhead" I'm talking about is the invocation of /bin/sh. I want to be able to pipe directly into /usr/bin/wc from the buffer, without /bin/sh also being called. It appears that this is not possible in emacs, but perhaps I'm missing something.
    – HippoMan
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 15:11
  • I stumbled upon make-pipe-process. I think i can use it to create a process for running an executable without using any shell, which can then accept input via send-process. That input could be the contents of a buffer. I will code up a proof-of-concept, and if it works, I'll post it here as an answer. Excelsior!
    – HippoMan
    Commented Dec 6, 2016 at 1:05

1 Answer 1

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I figured it out. It turns out that I can send input to a process invoked via start-process, and so I don't need to use call-process at all. Since start-process doesn't invoke the specified command via the shell, this solves my problem.

Here is a simplified example which shows how to do it ...

(let ((proc (start-process "procname" "buffname" "/path/to/executable" "arg0" "arg1")))
  (process-send-region proc (point-min) (point-max))
  (process-send-eof proc))
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