elisp: Batch Mode
38.17 Batch Mode
================
The command-line option ‘-batch’ causes Emacs to run noninteractively.
In this mode, Emacs does not read commands from the terminal, it does
not alter the terminal modes, and it does not expect to be outputting to
an erasable screen. The idea is that you specify Lisp programs to run;
when they are finished, Emacs should exit. The way to specify the
programs to run is with ‘-l FILE’, which loads the library named FILE,
or ‘-f FUNCTION’, which calls FUNCTION with no arguments, or ‘--eval
FORM’.
Any Lisp program output that would normally go to the echo area,
either using ‘message’, or using ‘prin1’, etc., with ‘t’ as the stream,
goes instead to Emacs’s standard descriptors when in batch mode:
‘message’ writes to the standard error descriptor, while ‘prin1’ and
other print functions write to the standard output. Similarly, input
that would normally come from the minibuffer is read from the standard
input descriptor. Thus, Emacs behaves much like a noninteractive
application program. (The echo area output that Emacs itself normally
generates, such as command echoing, is suppressed entirely.)
Non-ASCII text written to the standard output or error descriptors is
by default encoded using ‘locale-coding-system’ (
Locales) if it
is non-‘nil’; this can be overridden by binding
‘coding-system-for-write’ to a coding system of you choice (
Explicit Encoding).
-- Variable: noninteractive
This variable is non-‘nil’ when Emacs is running in batch mode.
Info Catalog
elisp: X11 Keysyms
elisp: System Interface
elisp: Session Management