Lately, ido is my shortcut to many commands that I used to execute in shell. It's great to have a flexible matching with autocompletion, inside your development environment. The function to call from your elisp code is ido-completing-read which has the following signature:
(ido-completing-read PROMPT CHOICES &optional PREDICATE REQUIRE-MATCH
INITIAL-INPUT HIST DEF INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD)
Let's see an example of using ido to collect a parameter from the
user. I have my favourite streaming radios stored in pls or asx
files, and this little function allows me to type M-x radio RET to
listen any of those.(defun radio () (interactive) (let ((filename (ido-completing-read "which radio?: " (directory-files "/home/rgrau/bin/radios/" nil "\\.pls$\\|\\.asx$")))) (async-shell-command (concat "mplayer -playlist /home/rgrau/bin/radios/" filename) "*mplayer*" ) (message "choosen: %s" filename)))
Now you can easily port many commands you used to run on terminal to be executed inside your favourite editor.
EDIT: A copypasta fail made this post appear like without body in planet emacsen. sorry :(