How to run multiple shells on Emacs

I am using Emacs 23.3.1 on windows 7. I know that I can run shell from emacs using M-x shell. I would like to have multiple shell windows in the same time, but typing M-x shell a second time just opens me the same shell window.

Is there a way to have different shell windows?

C-u M-x shell will do it.

It will prompt for a name for the new shell, just hit return for the default (which will be something like *shell*<2>.

Also works with eshell.

Another trick, if you use eshell: just as M-x eshell takes you back to *eshell* (rather than starting a new eshell), if you use a numeric prefix argument it will take you to that eshell buffer. For instance, C-3M-xeshell will take you to *eshell*<3>. Sadly if you use shell (rather than eshell), this trick doesn't seem to work (in my Emacs 24.0.50.1 at least.)

You can rename the buffer of your shell with M-x rename-buffer. Then you will be able to launch a second shell.

Look at MultiTerm, it makes managing multiple terminals in Emacs much easier.

After more than four years, I see that some people are still looking at this issue sometimes, so I will publish a quick function I wrote to load a shell and ask for its name. That way you can name a shell "sort-files" if it is dedicated to sorting files and another one "hive" if it's dedicated to run hive queries. I use that everyday now (on emacs 24):

(defun create-shell ()
    "creates a shell with a given name"
    (interactive);; "Prompt\n shell name:")
    (let ((shell-name (read-string "shell name: " nil)))
    (shell (concat "*" shell-name "*"))))