I understand why you say that maxim but testing that this worked was the
first thing I did and it does work. I was surprised as well. I haven't
debugged all the way into the eval functions to see why this works but my
guess is that the authors were pretty smart about figuring out which
executable to invoke.

As for the problem I'm trying to solve, there isn't one exactly. This is
more me hacking on something I don't fully understand because it regularly
trips me up.

I do still wonder what would be the disadvantage of just configuring it to
do --login by default and doing all configuration in profile scripts. It
would be unconventional yes, but it would also make dynamic scoping of
environment variable effectively opt-in via --noprofile rather than opt-out
(which imo is how it should be). I would assume that uses extra resources
or risks improperly handling crashed processes, but I can't find anything
to that effect in the docs

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 07:32 Maxim Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 16/03/2021 00:49, George Mauer wrote:
> >    shell-file-name: "/bin/zsh -i"
>
> I am afraid, you should be prepared to face some problem accidentally.
> The value of this variable is used to execute the specified file
> ("zsh -i" in the "/bin" directory, I do not think, you have such file),
> not as a part of shell command. shell-file-name in namely file name to
> be executed with shell-command-switch as first argument (separate
> arguments, not merged into a string) to run shell commands (next argument).
>
> Environment variables could be set on OS level, inside emacs
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Environment.html
> , etc. It is hard to suggest something since you have not described the
> problem you are trying to solve. Tim in details explained why you
> attempt to solve it did not work, but the problem (or the goal) is still
> unknown.
>
>
>