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I just installed Emacs 24.4 from source (on Ubuntu 14.04). I now get the following error when running Emacs:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
  string-match("/[._]emacs\\.d/?\\'" nil nil)
  command-line()
  normal-top-level()

For debugging, I reduced my ~/.emacs init file to:

(setq debug-on-error t)
(add-to-list 'load-path nil)

Then the error occurs only when starting Emacs with two arguments, where the first argument is an option, for example --no-splash, and the second argument is a file name with a suffix, for example a.txt. Some other observations:

  • If I remove the option (--no-splash) it works fine,
  • if I remove the line (add-to-list 'load-path nil) it works fine,
  • if I run with Emacs v. 24.3 it works fine,
  • if I change nil to ".", in ~/.emacs it works fine,
  • if I remove the suffix from the file name, that is: changing a.txt to a, I get another error: Args out of range: 0.

Edit After adding nil to load-path, the variable looks like:

(nil "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/site-lisp" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/site-lisp" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/vc" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/url" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/textmodes" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/progmodes" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/play" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/org" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/nxml" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/net" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/mh-e" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/mail" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/leim" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/language" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/international" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/gnus" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/eshell" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/erc" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/emulation" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/emacs-lisp" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/cedet" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/calendar" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/calc" "/opt/emacs24.4/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/obsolete")

According to the Emacs manual:

Variable: load-path

The value of this variable is a list of directories to search when loading files with load. Each element is a string (which must be a directory name) or nil (which stands for the current working directory).

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    Note for moderators: I tried to add a tag to my question for commandline arguments, but could not find any such tags.. Maybe it should be added by someone?
    – Håkon Hægland
    Jan 12, 2015 at 10:34
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    There is no such tag yet, therefore I went with init since this is about what happens before Emacs initialization is done.
    – wasamasa
    Jan 12, 2015 at 10:55
  • M-x report-emacs-bug
    – Drew
    Jan 12, 2015 at 15:34
  • Just out of curiosity, why would you (on purpose) be trying to add nil to your load-path? Unless I am mistaken, the purpose of using add-to-list is to add something to a list, instead of nothing. And if Emacs looks to that list to decide which files to load and it encounters a nil value, wouldn't one naturally expect to see an error? How could a nil value inside a load-path list be useful?
    – lawlist
    Jan 12, 2015 at 17:19
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    @lawlist Thanks.. Yes it is probably a bad idea, but still it is not the correct behavior :) So it is probably a bug somewhere..
    – Håkon Hægland
    Jan 12, 2015 at 17:34

1 Answer 1

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This is a bug in Emacs source startup.el and has already been fixed for the next release of Emacs.. See http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=19584 for more details..

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