When I load a shell at startup in my init file, why do I get 26 shell prompts?

Question

When I load a shell at startup - just using (shell) in my .emacs file - there are always 26 shell prompts "bash-3.2$ bash-3.2$ bash-3.2$...". Why is that happening? This is happening the same way in emacs on a terminal and aquamacs.

Answer 1

Use binary search to narrow things down to find the culprit. Sounds complicated, but it is very fast.

Just comment out half of your init file (.emacs), then a quarter, then an eighth, etc. until you know precisely what part causes the problem. Use any of the keys/commands that comment/uncomment the region to do this. (I use comment-region, which I bind to C-M-;.