Using nodejs's spawn causes “unknown option — ” and “[Error: spawn ENOENT]” errors

Question

I\'m trying to get spawn to effect an rm -rf node_modules followed by npm install (on windows 7; nx commands courtesy of a tr

Answer 1

I think this may be some sort of cygwin gotcha. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and tried to duplicate your problem, but it works just fine for me. In short, I don't see anything you are doing wrong.

If it is complaining about the option, maybe split it up into multiple options like so:

child = spawn("rm", ["-r", "-f", "node_modules"]);

That's kind of a hail mary, but that works on my Ubuntu 12.04 as well. You might try to just delete a single file and see if you get the same thing.

child = spawn("rm", ["/home/username/Desktop/TestFile"]);

If that still fails, then you know you are working against some crazy stuff.

You could even try to just execute a command with no parameters like so:

child = spawn("ls");

If that still fails, you aren't likely to get spawn to work at all would be my guess and be grateful that at least exec is working.

Not much in the realm of answers for you, but like I said, I can't see anything you are doing incorrectly.

Furthermore, I don't see how your npm command is going to work because you aren't specifying what to install, but that being said, it fails in a different way than I'm seeing it fail here if I use the same command. . . I see lots of stderr output, not an overall error.

BTW, I'm running node v0.8.21. You can query that by node -v. If you are running another version, maybe give 0.8.21 a try.