Re: Async commands in M-x compile

[Ken Raeburn]

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.

> 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 "&".

Ken