2.3 Scripts

Like other shells, you can create Eshell scripts. An Eshell script is simply a file containing a sequence of commands that will be executed as though you entered them one at a time in an interactive Eshell session. You can invoke these scripts from within Eshell with source, which will run the script in a subshell. If you wish to run a script in your current Eshell environment, use the . command instead.

Like with aliases (see Aliases), Eshell scripts can accept any number of arguments. Within the script, you can refer to these with the special variables $0, $1, …, $9, and $*.

You can also invoke Eshell scripts from outside of Eshell:

Function: eshell-execute-file file &optional args destination ¶

Execute the Eshell commands contained in file, passing an optional list of args to the script. If destination is t, write the command output to the current buffer. If nil, don’t write the output anywhere. For any other value, output to the corresponding Eshell target (see Redirection).

Function: eshell-batch-file ¶

This function lets you make an Eshell script file executable from outside of Emacs by adding it to the script’s interpreter directive like this:

#!/usr/bin/env -S emacs --batch -f eshell-batch-file

As with other ways of invoking Eshell scripts, you can pass extra arguments to the script on the command line.