Re: Async commands in M-x compile

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Antoine Levitt <address@hidden> writes:

> Ken Raeburn <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Jun 29, 2010, at 18:43, Antoine Levitt wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> Can someone explain to me why compile doesn't support asynchroneous
>>> commands, and especially why it silently fails instead of displaying an
>>> error message? I don't understand the mechanism involved here.
>>
>> The program run -- the shell -- exits (after having started some other
>> program in background).  The compilation command has finished, and
>> exited with an exit status that indicates success.  So, you're done.
>> I could argue that it "succeeded", though apparently not at doing
>> whatever it is that you think it should do.
>
> Yes, I would completely agree with that, except it _doesn't_ start the
> program. Try running "xclock &"
>
>>
>>> As a test, try M-x compile with "echo test > ~/test &" or "xclock &".
>>
>> Why would you need something like that?  Compilation mode already lets
>> you continue doing stuff in Emacs while the compilation runs.  And you
>> can use something like "make -j" to run multiple tasks in parallel,
>> without losing track of the exit statuses of subprocesses, like you
>> would with "&".
>>
>> If you're not actually trying to do compilation, but just run some
>> task in background without monitoring its progress or parsing error
>> messages after failure, there's shell-mode, or you can give
>> shell-command (M-!) a command ending with "&".
>
> Well, to be fair, I'm actually using compilation for another purpose
> than what it was built for. I want to perform the action "compile latex,
> if there is already a viewer, bring it to the front, if not, run one",
> ie,
>
> rubber -d main && (wmctrl -a main.pdf || gnome-open main.pdf &)

Have you tried AUCTeX?  It should be able to do this by default ...
Alternatively, you can use the infrastructure in tex.el to accomplish
what you want.