Hello dear emacs maintainers,

If the local used shell does not exist on the remote the shell-command-to-string function from simple.el does not work as expected. The reason for this is that the variable shell-file-name is wrong and therefore one only gets a string saying that the shell does not exist.

Changing the function to

(defun shell-command-to-string (command)

"Execute shell command COMMAND and return its output as a string."

(with-output-to-string

(with-current-buffer

standard-output

(let ((shell-file-name

(with-temp-buffer

(apply #'process-file "printenv" nil t nil '("SHELL"))

(string-trim-right (buffer-string)))))

(process-file shell-file-name nil t nil shell-command-switch command)))))

does work for remotes that do not have the local shell, too.

I hope this is the right place for this and additionally wanted to thank you for maintaining emacs.

Best regards,

Benedikt Tissot