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cross-spawn

cross-spawn

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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 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.

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.

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Keywords

spawn, spawnSync, windows, cross, platform, path, ext, path-ext, path_ext, shebang, hashbang, cmd, execute

Dependencies (3)

lru-cache, shebang-command, which

Dependents (1543)

create-ng4-semantic-ui, create-rn-web-app, @viankakrisna/create-react-app, @storybook/cli, npm-reinstall, @kasperpeulen/react-scripts, dool-init, @andyhite/create-react-app, node-nightly-sane, relay-scripts, node-nightly, create-react-app-module, jsonnull-create-project, bb-cli-nightly, samwds, ch-scripts, rawly, generator-schlesinger, react-scripts-fork, @zkochan/lerna, react-scripts-flipjs, buffered-spawn, node-sass-temp, ColeTownsend, evv-platform, dc-react-scripts, npm-env, unibeautify-cli, bstalk, cross-spawn-with-kill, npm-run-batch, nswatch, baodian_activity, zaggino.brackets-git, greyhounds, node-pre-commit, uba-scripts, ts-cli, with.js, thimble, react-ts-scripts, react-redux-scripts, nodocker, framer-electron-preview, preact-scripts, cerebral-cli, binge, project-fuzzball-test, snorkel-scripts, vanuan-testem, and more