GNU bug report logs - #35257
eshell and xclip

Previous Next

Full log

Message #8 received at 35257 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Noam Postavsky <npostavs <at> gmail.com>
To: Daniel Sockwell <daniel <at> codesections.com>
Cc: 35257 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#35257: eshell and xclip
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2019 09:54:07 -0400

Daniel Sockwell <daniel <at> codesections.com> writes:

> I recently ran into a minor issue, however.  I discovered that xclip
> does not seem to work at all in eshell: the same commands that work fine
> in a term buffer (or in external terminal emulators) have no effect in
> eshell.  Further, the command does not provide an error message, it just
> fails to set the system clipboard.

> (This is my first time submitting an Emacs bug, but I am sure it won't be my
> last—I plan to get more involved in the project soon.  Please let me know if
> should do anything differently in future bug reports or if I can provide any
> other information about this bug/help in any other way.  Thanks so much!)

It would help to have a precise recipe starting from 'emacs -Q' to
reproduce the problem.  In this case I'm guessing it should be like
this:

emacs -Q -f eshell

    Welcome to the Emacs shell

    ~ $ echo foo | xclip -i
    ~ $ xclip -o
    Error: target STRING not available

And in comparison the expected output with shell:

emacs -Q -f shell

    $ echo foo | xclip -i
    $ xclip -o
    foo

With eshell bugs, it's often a good idea to reproduce the issue with
some plain lisp calls (if possible).  The simplest way to call external
processes from Emacs is with call-process:

    (progn (with-temp-file "/tmp/foo"
             (insert "foo"))
           (call-process "xclip" "/tmp/foo" '(t t) t "-i"))

But that just hangs until C-g.  So I'm really not sure what's going on
(is this a different bug, or the same one?).  Maybe debugging on the
xclip side is needed.

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.