@cspotcode/cross-spawn NPM

@cspotcode/cross-spawn

This is a proof-of-concept fork of cross-spawn while I wait for a fix to be merged upstream.

A cross platform solution to node's spawn and spawnSync.

Installation

$ npm install @cspotcode/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 <v4.8
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('@cspotcode/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 `@cspotcode/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 @cspotcode/cross-spawn attempts to solve, but:

It's not supported in node <v4.8
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 @cspotcode/cross-spawn instead. You have been warned.

Shebangs

While @cspotcode/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!