2.3 Built-in commands

Several commands are built-in in Eshell. In order to call the external variant of a built-in command foo, you could call *foo. Usually, this should not be necessary. You can check what will be applied by the which command:

~ $ which ls
eshell/ls is a compiled Lisp function in `em-ls.el'
~ $ which *ls
/bin/ls

If you want to discard a given built-in command, you could declare an alias (see Aliases). Example:

~ $ which sudo
eshell/sudo is a compiled Lisp function in `em-tramp.el'.
~ $ alias sudo '*sudo $*'
~ $ which sudo
sudo is an alias, defined as "*sudo $*"

If you would prefer to use the built-in commands instead of the external commands, set eshell-prefer-lisp-functions to t.

Some of the built-in commands have different behavior from their external counterparts, and some have no external counterpart. Most of these will print a usage message when given the --help option.

addpath ¶

Adds a given path or set of paths to the PATH environment variable, or, with no arguments, prints the current paths in this variable.

alias ¶

Define an alias (see Aliases). This adds it to the aliases file.

clear ¶

Scrolls the contents of the eshell window out of sight, leaving a blank window. If provided with an optional non-nil argument, the scrollback contents are cleared instead.

date ¶

Similar to, but slightly different from, the GNU Coreutils date command.

define ¶

Define a varalias. See Variable Aliases in The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.

diff ¶

Use Emacs’s internal diff (not to be confused with ediff). See Comparing Files in The GNU Emacs Manual.

grep ¶

agrep

egrep

fgrep

glimpse

The grep commands are compatible with GNU grep, but use Emacs’s internal grep instead.

info ¶

Same as the external info command, but uses Emacs’s internal Info reader.

jobs ¶

List subprocesses of the Emacs process, if any, using the function list-processes.

kill ¶

Kill processes. Takes a PID or a process object and an optional signal specifier which can either be a number or a signal name.

listify ¶

Eshell version of list. Allows you to create a list using Eshell syntax, rather than Elisp syntax. For example, ‘listify foo bar’ and ("foo" "bar") both evaluate to ("foo" "bar").

locate ¶

Alias to Emacs’s locate function, which simply runs the external locate command and parses the results. See Dired and Find in The GNU Emacs Manual.

make ¶

Run make through compile when run asynchronously (e.g., ‘make &’). See Compilation in The GNU Emacs Manual. Otherwise call the external make command.

occur ¶

Alias to Emacs’s occur. See Other Repeating Search in The GNU Emacs Manual.

printnl ¶

Print the arguments separated by newlines.

cd ¶

This command changes the current working directory. Usually, it is invoked as ‘cd foo’ where foo is the new working directory. But cd knows about a few special arguments:

When it receives no argument at all, it changes to the home directory.

Giving the command ‘cd -’ changes back to the previous working directory (this is the same as ‘cd $-’).

The command ‘cd =’ shows the directory stack. Each line is numbered.

With ‘cd =foo’, Eshell searches the directory stack for a directory matching the regular expression ‘foo’ and changes to that directory.

With ‘cd -42’, you can access the directory stack by number.

su ¶

sudo

Uses TRAMP’s su or sudo method see (tramp)Inline methods to run a command via su or sudo. These commands are in the eshell-tramp module, which is disabled by default.

• Built-in variables