Synchronous process creation

The child_process.spawnSync(), child_process.execSync(), and child_process.execFileSync() methods are synchronous and will block the Node.js event loop, pausing execution of any additional code until the spawned process exits.

Blocking calls like these are mostly useful for simplifying general-purpose scripting tasks and for simplifying the loading/processing of application configuration at startup.

child_process.execFileSync(file, args?, options?): Buffer | string

The child_process.execFileSync() method is generally identical to child_process.execFile() with the exception that the method will not return until the child process has fully closed. When a timeout has been encountered and killSignal is sent, the method won't return until the process has completely exited.

If the child process intercepts and handles the SIGTERM signal and does not exit, the parent process will still wait until the child process has exited.

If the process times out or has a non-zero exit code, this method will throw an Error that will include the full result of the underlying child_process.spawnSync().

If the shell option is enabled, do not pass unsanitized user input to this function. Any input containing shell metacharacters may be used to trigger arbitrary command execution.

const { execFileSync } = require('node:child_process');

try {
  const stdout = execFileSync('my-script.sh', ['my-arg'], {
    // Capture stdout and stderr from child process. Overrides the
    // default behavior of streaming child stderr to the parent stderr
    stdio: 'pipe',

    // Use utf8 encoding for stdio pipes
    encoding: 'utf8',
  });

  console.log(stdout);
} catch (err) {
  if (err.code) {
    // Spawning child process failed
    console.error(err.code);
  } else {
    // Child was spawned but exited with non-zero exit code
    // Error contains any stdout and stderr from the child
    const { stdout, stderr } = err;

    console.error({ stdout, stderr });
  }
}

import { execFileSync } from 'node:child_process';

try {
  const stdout = execFileSync('my-script.sh', ['my-arg'], {
    // Capture stdout and stderr from child process. Overrides the
    // default behavior of streaming child stderr to the parent stderr
    stdio: 'pipe',

    // Use utf8 encoding for stdio pipes
    encoding: 'utf8',
  });

  console.log(stdout);
} catch (err) {
  if (err.code) {
    // Spawning child process failed
    console.error(err.code);
  } else {
    // Child was spawned but exited with non-zero exit code
    // Error contains any stdout and stderr from the child
    const { stdout, stderr } = err;

    console.error({ stdout, stderr });
  }
}

child_process.execSync(command, options?): Buffer | string

The child_process.execSync() method is generally identical to child_process.exec() with the exception that the method will not return until the child process has fully closed. When a timeout has been encountered and killSignal is sent, the method won't return until the process has completely exited. If the child process intercepts and handles the SIGTERM signal and doesn't exit, the parent process will wait until the child process has exited.

If the process times out or has a non-zero exit code, this method will throw. The Error object will contain the entire result from child_process.spawnSync().

Never pass unsanitized user input to this function. Any input containing shell metacharacters may be used to trigger arbitrary command execution.

child_process.spawnSync(command, args?, options?): Object

The child_process.spawnSync() method is generally identical to child_process.spawn() with the exception that the function will not return until the child process has fully closed. When a timeout has been encountered and killSignal is sent, the method won't return until the process has completely exited. If the process intercepts and handles the SIGTERM signal and doesn't exit, the parent process will wait until the child process has exited.

If the shell option is enabled, do not pass unsanitized user input to this function. Any input containing shell metacharacters may be used to trigger arbitrary command execution.