How to execute an external program from within Node js

Question

Is it possible to execute an external program from within node.js? Is there an equivalent to Python's os.system() or any library that adds this functionality?

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

Exec has memory limitation of buffer size of 512k. In this case it is better to use spawn. With spawn one has access to stdout of executed command at run time

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
var prc = spawn('java',  ['-jar', '-Xmx512M', '-Dfile.encoding=utf8', 'script/importlistings.jar']);

//noinspection JSUnresolvedFunction
prc.stdout.setEncoding('utf8');
prc.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
    var str = data.toString()
    var lines = str.split(/(\r?\n)/g);
    console.log(lines.join(""));
});

prc.on('close', function (code) {
    console.log('process exit code ' + code);
});

Hope this is helpful!!

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Thank You!!