Exec : display stdout “live”

Question

I have this simple script :

var exec = require(\'child_process\').exec;

exec(\'coffee -cw my_file.coffee\', function(error, stdout, stderr) {
    console.lo         


        

Answer 1

child_process.spawn returns an object with stdout and stderr streams. You can tap on the stdout stream to read data that the child process sends back to Node. stdout being a stream has the "data", "end", and other events that streams have. spawn is best used to when you want the child process to return a large amount of data to Node - image processing, reading binary data etc.

so you can solve your problem using child_process.spawn as used below.

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn,
ls = spawn('coffee -cw my_file.coffee');

ls.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
  console.log('stdout: ' + data.toString());
});

ls.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
  console.log('stderr: ' + data.toString());
});

ls.on('exit', function (code) {
  console.log('code ' + code.toString());
});

Answer 2

After reviewing all the other answers, I ended up with this:

function oldSchoolMakeBuild(cb) {
    var makeProcess = exec('make -C ./oldSchoolMakeBuild',
         function (error, stdout, stderr) {
             stderr && console.error(stderr);
             cb(error);
        });
    makeProcess.stdout.on('data', function(data) {
        process.stdout.write('oldSchoolMakeBuild: '+ data);
    });
}

Sometimes data will be multiple lines, so the oldSchoolMakeBuild header will appear once for multiple lines. But this didn't bother me enough to change it.

Answer 3

I have found it helpful to add a custom exec script to my utilities that do this.

utilities.js

const { exec } = require('child_process')

module.exports.exec = (command) => {
  const process = exec(command)

  process.stdout.on('data', (data) => {
    console.log('stdout: ' + data.toString())
  })

  process.stderr.on('data', (data) => {
    console.log('stderr: ' + data.toString())
  })

  process.on('exit', (code) => {
    console.log('child process exited with code ' + code.toString())
  })
}

app.js

const { exec } = require('./utilities.js')

exec('coffee -cw my_file.coffee')