does emacs have an integrated terminal view inside it? Seems like maybe it's just creating a shell for you to use inside the editor or something? Either way, "bash --login" is just a login shell which I think basically just acts like if you had just logged in instead of inheriting most stuff from whatever process launched it. It in't "logging in" like some user account or something. Unlikely that it's something nefarious. At worst, it's just usual buggy linux software interacting in weird ways.