Exec : display stdout “live”

问题:

I have this simple script :

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

exec('coffee -cw my_file.coffee', function(error, stdout, stderr) {
    console.log(stdout);
});

where I simply execute a command to compile a coffee-script file. But stdout never get displayed in the console, because the command never ends (because of the -w option of coffee). If I execute the command directly from the console I get message like this :

18:05:59 - compiled my_file.coffee

My question is : is it possible to display these messages with the node.js exec ? If yes how ? !

Thanks

回答1:

Don't use exec. Use spawn which is an EventEmmiter object. Then you can listen to stdout/stderr events (spawn.stdout.on('data',callback..)) as they happen.

From NodeJS documentation:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn,
    ls    = spawn('ls', ['-lh', '/usr']);

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('child process exited with code ' + code.toString());
});

exec buffers the output and usually returns it when the command has finished executing.

回答2:

exec will also return a ChildProcess object that is an EventEmitter.

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
var coffeeProcess = exec('coffee -cw my_file.coffee');

coffeeProcess.stdout.on('data', function(data) {
    console.log(data); 
});

OR pipe the child process's stdout to the main stdout.

coffeeProcess.stdout.pipe(process.stdout);

回答3:

There are already several answers however none of them mention the best (and easiest) way to do this, which is using spawn and the { stdio: 'inherit' } option. It seems to produce the most accurate output, for example when displaying the progress information from a git clone.

Simply do this:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

spawn('coffee', ['-cw', 'my_file.coffee'], { stdio: 'inherit' });

Credit to @MorganTouvereyQuilling for pointing this out in this comment.

回答4:

I'd just like to add that one small issue with outputting the buffer strings from a spawned process with console.log() is that it adds newlines, which can spread your spawned process output over additional lines. If you output stdout or stderr with process.stdout.write() instead of console.log(), then you'll get the console output from the spawned process 'as is'.

I saw that solution here: Node.js: printing to console without a trailing newline?

Hope that helps someone using the solution above (which is a great one for live output, even if it is from the documentation).

回答5:

Inspired by Nathanael Smith's answer and Eric Freese's comment, it could be as simple as:

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
exec('coffee -cw my_file.coffee').stdout.pipe(process.stdout);

回答6:

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.

回答7:

I have found it helpful to add a custom exec script to my utilities that does 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')

回答8:

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());
});