[javascript] How to execute shell command in Javascript

I want to write a JavaScript function which will execute the system shell commands (ls for example) and return the value.

How do I achieve this?

Many of the other answers here seem to address this issue from the perspective of a JavaScript function running in the browser. I'll shoot and answer assuming that when the asker said "Shell Script" he meant a Node.js backend JavaScript. Possibly using commander.js to use frame your code :)

You could use the child_process module from node's API. I pasted the example code below.

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

child = exec('cat *.js bad_file | wc -l',
    function (error, stdout, stderr) {
        console.log('stdout: ' + stdout);
        console.log('stderr: ' + stderr);
        if (error !== null) {
             console.log('exec error: ' + error);
        }
    });
 child();

Hope this helps!

In IE, you can do this :

var shell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
shell.run("cmd /c dir & pause");

This depends entirely on the JavaScript environment. Please elaborate.

For example, in Windows Scripting, you do things like:

var shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
shell.Run("command here");

With NodeJS is simple like that! And if you want to run this script at each boot of your server, you can have a look on the forever-service application!

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

exec('php main.php', function (error, stdOut, stdErr) {
    // do what you want!
});

In a nutshell:

// Instantiate the Shell object and invoke its execute method.
var oShell = new ActiveXObject("Shell.Application");

var commandtoRun = "C:\\Winnt\\Notepad.exe";
if (inputparms != "") {
  var commandParms = document.Form1.filename.value;
}

// Invoke the execute method.  
oShell.ShellExecute(commandtoRun, commandParms, "", "open", "1");

If you are using npm you can use the shelljs package

To install: npm install [-g] shelljs

var shell = require('shelljs');
shell.ls('*.js').forEach(function (file) {
// do something
});

See more: https://www.npmjs.com/package/shelljs

...few year later...

ES6 has been accepted as a standard and ES7 is around the corner so it deserves updated answer. We'll use ES6+async/await with nodejs+babel as an example, prerequisites are:

• nodejs with npm
• babel

Your example foo.js file may look like:

import { exec } from 'child_process';

/**
 * Execute simple shell command (async wrapper).
 * @param {String} cmd
 * @return {Object} { stdout: String, stderr: String }
 */
async function sh(cmd) {
  return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
    exec(cmd, (err, stdout, stderr) => {
      if (err) {
        reject(err);
      } else {
        resolve({ stdout, stderr });
      }
    });
  });
}

async function main() {
  let { stdout } = await sh('ls');
  for (let line of stdout.split('\n')) {
    console.log(`ls: ${line}`);
  }
}

main();

Make sure you have babel:

npm i babel-cli -g

Install latest preset:

npm i babel-preset-latest

Run it via:

babel-node --presets latest foo.js

Here is simple command that executes ifconfig shell command of Linux

var process = require('child_process');
process.exec('ifconfig',function (err,stdout,stderr) {
    if (err) {
        console.log("\n"+stderr);
    } else {
        console.log(stdout);
    }
});

I don't know why the previous answers gave all sorts of complicated solutions. If you just want to execute a quick command like ls, you don't need async/await or callbacks or anything. Here's all you need - execSync:

const execSync = require('child_process').execSync;
// import { execSync } from 'child_process';  // replace ^ if using ES modules
const output = execSync('ls', { encoding: 'utf-8' });  // the default is 'buffer'
console.log('Output was:\n', output);

For error handling, add a try/catch block around the statement.

If you're running a command that takes a long time to complete, then yes, look at the asynchronous exec function.

function exec(cmd, handler = function(error, stdout, stderr){console.log(stdout);if(error !== null){console.log(stderr)}})
{
    const childfork = require('child_process');
    return childfork.exec(cmd, handler);
}

This function can be easily used like:

exec('echo test');
//output:
//test

exec('echo test', function(err, stdout){console.log(stdout+stdout+stdout)});
//output:
//testtesttest

With nashorn you can write a script like this:

$EXEC('find -type f');
var files = $OUT.split('\n');
files.forEach(...
...

and run it:

jjs -scripting each_file.js

Another post on this topic with a nice jQuery/Ajax/PHP solution:

shell scripting and jQuery

Note: These answers are from a browser based client to a Unix based web server.

Run command on client

You essentially can't. Security says only run within a browser and its access to commands and filesystem is limited.

Run ls on server

You can use an AJAX call to retrieve a dynamic page passing in your parameters via a GET.

Be aware that this also opens up a security risk as you would have to do something to ensure that mrs rouge hacker does not get your application to say run: /dev/null && rm -rf / ......

So in a nutshel, running from JS is just a bad, bad idea.... YMMV