How do I make C-w behave the same as bash?

Question

In bash when I press C-w it kills the word before the cursor. In emacs, it yanks the region but when there is no active region it kills forward. So I have to press M- to (backward-kill-word) How do I make C-w behave like the bash shell? Do I have to make a function to check for active region and then decide to kill either (backwards-kill-word) or (kill-region) or is there another way?

Answer 1

From my defuns.el (probably ripped from elsewhere):

(defun kill-region-or-backward-word ()
  "If the region is active and non-empty, call `kill-region'.
Otherwise, call `backward-kill-word'."
  (interactive)
  (call-interactively
   (if (use-region-p) 'kill-region 'backward-kill-word)))

Edit: tali713 on #emacs had this better version with call-interactively.