What is cross-spawn?
The cross-spawn npm package is a cross-platform solution for spawning child processes in Node.js. It aims to resolve issues with spawning commands across different operating systems, particularly Windows, where the built-in child_process.spawn can behave inconsistently. It provides a consistent API for spawning processes and handling their output, errors, and exit codes.
What are cross-spawn's main functionalities?
Spawning a child process
This feature allows you to spawn a child process, similar to child_process.spawn, but with improved cross-platform support. The code sample demonstrates how to spawn an 'npm install' process and listen for its exit event.
const spawn = require('cross-spawn');
const child = spawn('npm', ['install']);
child.on('exit', function (code, signal) {
console.log('Child process exited with code ' + code);
});
Spawning a synchronous child process
This feature allows you to spawn a child process and wait for it to finish synchronously, returning the result. The code sample demonstrates how to synchronously spawn an 'npm install' process and log the exit code.
const spawnSync = require('cross-spawn').sync;
const result = spawnSync('npm', ['install'], { stdio: 'inherit' });
console.log('Child process exited with code ' + result.status);
Handling command-line arguments properly
This feature ensures that command-line arguments are handled properly across different platforms. The code sample demonstrates how to spawn an 'echo' command with arguments and handle the standard output.
const spawn = require('cross-spawn');
const child = spawn('echo', ['Hello World!'], { shell: true });
child.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
console.log('stdout: ' + data.toString());
});
Other packages similar to cross-spawn
child_process
This is a core Node.js module that provides the ability to spawn child processes. While it is similar to cross-spawn, it does not always handle cross-platform inconsistencies, especially on Windows, as well as cross-spawn does.
execa
Execa is a popular npm package that provides a similar functionality to cross-spawn. It improves child process methods and supports synchronous and promise-based APIs. It is often considered a more modern alternative with additional features like automatic error handling, but cross-spawn is still preferred in some cases for its simplicity and specific cross-platform fixes.
shelljs
ShellJS is a portable Unix shell commands implementation for Node.js. It provides a high-level API to execute shell commands in a cross-platform way. While it offers similar cross-platform benefits, it is more focused on emulating Unix shell commands rather than providing a direct child process spawn interface.
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
- It does not allow you to run
del
or dir
- It does not properly escape arguments with spaces or special characters
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');
var child = spawn('npm', ['list', '-g', '-depth', '0'], { stdio: 'inherit' });
var results = spawn.sync('npm', ['list', '-g', '-depth', '0'], { stdio: 'inherit' });
Caveat
On Windows, cross-spawn will only spawn cmd.exe
if necessary. If the extension
of the executable is .exe
or .com
, it will spawn it directly. If you wish
to override this behavior and always spawn a shell, pass the {shell: true}
option.
Tests
$ npm test
License
Released under the MIT License.