cross-spawn
A cross platform solution to node's spawn and spawnSync.
Installation
$ npm install cross-spawn
Why
Node has issues when using spawn on Windows:
- It ignores PATHEXT
- It does not support shebangs
- No
options.shell
support on node <v4.8
- Has problems running commands with spaces
- Has problems running commands with posix relative paths (e.g.:
my-folder/my-executable
) - Circuvents an issue around command shims (files in node_modules/.bin/), where arguments with quotes and parenthesis would result in an invalid syntax error
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' });
Caveats
Using options.shell
as an alternative to cross-spawn
Starting from node v4.8
, 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
<v4.8
- You must manually escape the command and arguments which is very error prone, specially when passing user input
- It just solves the PATHEXT issue from the Why section
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.
options.shell
support
While cross-spawn
adds support for options.shell
in node <v4.8
, all of its enhancements are disabled.
This mimics the Node.js behavior. More specifically, the command and its arguments will not be automatically escaped nor shebang support will be offered. This is by design because if you are using options.shell
you are probably targeting a specific platform anyway and you don't want things to get into your way.
Shebangs support
While cross-spawn
handles shebangs on Windows, its support is limited. More specifically, it just supports #!/usr/bin/env <program>
where <program>
must not contain any arguments.
If you would like to have the shebang support improved, feel free to contribute via a pull-request.
Remember to always test your code on Windows!
Tests
$ npm test
License
Released under the MIT License.