Hey list, I've tried posting on help-gnu-emacs mailing list first, but not luck so far, so I thought I'd try here, as I know there are many savvy emacs users around. I have a small Ruby CLI program that I want to call from emacs. This script simply opens an emacs orgmode file from a specific location in my hard drive, and does some text processing. When I call it from the terminal directly, it works fine. When I call it from emacs, the script fails with an encoding error. I'm using this elisp to call it from emacs after a buffer is saved: (defun test () > (let ((universal-coding-system-argument 'utf-8-unix)) > (shell-command "/Users/myself/.rvm/bin/rvm ruby-1.9.3-p194 do > /usr/bin/myrubyscript") > )) > (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'test) NOTE: The (let ((universal-coding-system-argument 'utf-8-unix)) was an attempt to fix it, but it made no difference whatsoever. After I save a buffer, the shell-command function is fired, but I get the following output in the "*Shell Command Output*" buffer: F, [2012-08-30T01:59:18.688827 #94004] FATAL -- : invalid byte sequence in > US-ASCII (ArgumentError) > /Users/myself/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/org-ruby-0.6.3/lib/org-ruby/parser.rb:89:in > `split' > /Users/myself/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/org-ruby-0.6.3/lib/org-ruby/parser.rb:89:in > `initia The strange thing is that the file that this script opens *is* accessible, and is the same file it would open if it were fired up from the terminal. For some reason, Emacs is getting in the way, but I have no idea what that could be. Am I missing something? If someone could enlighten me here, I'd be really grateful! Thanks in advance, - Marcelo.