Emacs shell scripts – how to put initial options into the script?-Collection of common programming errors

Inspired by Stack Overflow question Idomatic batch processing of text in Emacs? I tried out an Emacs shell script with the following headline:

#!/usr/bin/emacs --script 

I put some Emacs Lisp code in it, and saved it as textfile rcat.

Since the –script option does not prevent the loading of the site-start file, I had a lot of

Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/20apel.el (source)...
Loading /etc/emacs23/site-start.d/35elib-startup.el (source)...
Loading /etc/emacs23/site-start.d/50auctex.el (source)...

messages in the Bash shell (stdout). I can prevent that by calling

rcat --no-site-file

or

rcat -Q

but not by changing the headline in the script:

 #!/usr/bin/emacs --script --no-site-file

Is there a way to pass additional options to Emacs inside such a script file instead of doing it later on the commandline?

1. You could always change #!/usr/bin/emacs to something like #!/home/thorsten/bin/emacs-no-site-file, and set that up as:

   #!/bin/sh
   exec /usr/bin/emacs --no-site-file "$@"
   

   If this doesn’t work for you, or if you wish your script to be portable, then see Gilles’ answer below for a more robust (and slightly funky 🙂 approach.

2. If you run emacs in script mode, I would recommend to reset “argv” variable to nil in the end of your script, otherwise emacs will try interpret “argv” after script is finished.

   Let’s assume you have a file named “test-emacs-script.el” with the following content:

   #!/usr/bin/emacs --script
   (print argv)
   (setq argv nil)
   

   Try running this script as “./test-emacs-script.el -a”. If you run this script without resettings “argv” (last line in the script) then the output will be:

   ("-a")
   Unknown option `-a'
   

   Resetting “argv” gets rid of “unknown option” error message

Originally posted 2013-11-09 19:47:45.