When an input longer than 255 characters is typed into comint (or shell) an EOT character (ascii 4, ^D) is inserted into the string. This can cause an error depending how the sub process handles these extra characters. For example, GHC doesn't like it when an EOT appears inside of a string: ghci > Prelude> putStrLn "" works fine, but > Prelude> putStrLn "" :1:255: lexical error at character '\EOT' I inserted a function to break up the input into comint-send-string to work around the problem: (require 'comint) (defun comint-send-string (process string) "Like `process-send-string', but also does extra bookkeeping for Comint mode." (if process (with-current-buffer (if (processp process) (process-buffer process) (get-buffer process)) (comint-snapshot-last-prompt)) (comint-snapshot-last-prompt)) (my-process-send-string process string)) ;; Break up the string so that we don't get EOT characters in our input stream. (defun my-process-send-string (process string) (if (> (length string) 200) (progn (process-send-string process (substring string 0 200)) (my-process-send-string process (substring string 200))) (process-send-string process string)))