@tilastokeskus/cross-spawn
v5.0.1
Published
Cross platform child_process#spawn and child_process#spawnSync
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cross-spawn
A cross platform solution to node's spawn and spawnSync.
Installation
$ npm install cross-spawn
If you are using spawnSync
on node 0.10 or older, you will also need to install spawn-sync
:
$ npm install spawn-sync
Why
Node has issues when using spawn on Windows:
- It ignores PATHEXT
- It does not support shebangs
- No
options.shell
support on node < v6 - It does not allow you to run
del
ordir
All these issues are handled correctly by cross-spawn
.
There are some known modules, such as win-spawn, that try to solve this but they are either broken or provide faulty escaping of shell arguments.
Usage
Exactly the same way as node's spawn
or spawnSync
, so it's a drop in replacement.
var spawn = require('cross-spawn');
// Spawn NPM asynchronously
var child = spawn('npm', ['list', '-g', '-depth', '0'], { stdio: 'inherit' });
// Spawn NPM synchronously
var results = spawn.sync('npm', ['list', '-g', '-depth', '0'], { stdio: 'inherit' });
Caveats
options.shell
as an alternative to cross-spawn
Starting from node v6, spawn
has a shell
option that allows you run commands from within a shell. This new option solves most of the problems that cross-spawn
attempts to solve, but:
- It's not supported in node < v6
- It has no support for shebangs on Windows
- You must manually escape the command and arguments which is very error prone, specially when passing user input
If you are using the shell
option to spawn a command in a cross platform way, consider using cross-spawn
instead. You have been warned.
Shebangs
While cross-spawn
handles shebangs on Windows, its support is limited: e.g.: it doesn't handle arguments after the path, e.g.: #!/bin/bash -e
.
Remember to always test your code on Windows!
Tests
$ npm test
License
Released under the MIT License.