How to open interactive terminal apps with child_process?

[James Coglan]

Hi all,

I'd like to have my command-line Node program invoke another interactive shell program (in this case w3m, but think vim, less, and so on) as a child process so that it appears in my terminal. I thought I could do that like this:

require('child_process').execFile('w3m', ['http://www.google.com'], {stdio: 'inherit'})

But it turns out that doesn't work. Is this possible?

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James Coglan
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[James Coglan]

On 21 September 2012 12:40, James Coglan <jco...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to have my command-line Node program invoke another interactive shell program (in this case w3m, but think vim, less, and so on) as a child process so that it appears in my terminal. I thought I could do that like this:

require('child_process').execFile('w3m', ['http://www.google.com'], {stdio: 'inherit'})

But it turns out that doesn't work. Is this possible?

This is a bit better in that it displays the output from w3m, but it's not color formatted (I guess because its stdin is not a tty) and I can't interact with it properly:

var cp  = require('child_process'),

    w3m = cp.execFile('w3m', ['http://www.google.com']);

process.stdin.pipe(w3m.stdin);

w3m.stdout.pipe(process.stdout);

So I need to make w3m know it's writing to a tty, and forward every keystroke from Node to the child process. I tried process.stdin.setRawMode(true) but this just locked the process up and CTRL-C and CTRL-Z did not work. 

[Ben Noordhuis]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 12:40 PM, James Coglan <jco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to have my command-line Node program invoke another interactive
> shell program (in this case w3m, but think vim, less, and so on) as a child
> process so that it appears in my terminal. I thought I could do that like
> this:
>
> require('child_process').execFile('w3m', ['http://www.google.com'], {stdio:
> 'inherit'})
>
> But it turns out that doesn't work. Is this possible?

Yes, but not with the child_process module (not reliably anyway). Try
https://github.com/chjj/pty.js

[Mark Hahn]

It amazes me how often a question about some capability of node is answered with one or more spot-on solutions.  I guess lampp can offer the same convenience but node is only a few years old.

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[James Coglan]

On 21 September 2012 12:40, James Coglan <jco...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to have my command-line Node program invoke another interactive shell program (in this case w3m, but think vim, less, and so on) as a child process so that it appears in my terminal. I thought I could do that like this:

require('child_process').execFile('w3m', ['http://www.google.com'], {stdio: 'inherit'})

Turns out I can do what I want using spawn() instead of execFile(). I don't quite understand why from the docs -- someone care to enlighten me as to what's going on with processes and I/O streams and what the difference is between the two functions?

[Tim Caswell]

execFile is for buffering the output and storing it in a single value
in the callback. spawn is for streaming the results. My guess is
execFile ignores the custom stdio pipes.