Product
Introducing Enhanced Alert Actions and Triage Functionality
Socket now supports four distinct alert actions instead of the previous two, and alert triaging allows users to override the actions taken for all individual alerts.
cross-spawn
Advanced tools
Package description
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.
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());
});
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 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 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.
Changelog
Readme
A cross platform solution to node's spawn and spawnSync.
$ 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
Node has issues when using spawn on Windows:
options.shell
support on node < v6del
or dir
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.
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' });
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:
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.
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!
$ npm test
Released under the MIT License.
FAQs
Cross platform child_process#spawn and child_process#spawnSync
We found that cross-spawn demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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