7.7 How do I use a shell in Emacs?

You can start an interactive shell in Emacs by typing M-x shell. By default, this will start the standard Windows shell cmd.exe. Emacs uses the SHELL environment variable to determine which program to use as the shell. To instruct Emacs to use a non-default shell, you can either set this environment variable, or customize explicit-shell-file-name. You can also customize shell-file-name to change the shell that will be used by subprocesses that are started with shell-command and related non-interactive shell commands.