How to execute shell command in Javascript

Question

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

User · Answer

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");

User · Answer

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  amp  amp  rm -rf           So in a nutshel  running from JS is just a bad  bad idea     YMMV

User · Answer

In IE  you can do this    var shell   new ActiveXObject  WScript Shell    shell run  cmd  c dir  amp  pause

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Another post on this topic with a nice jQuery Ajax PHP solution   shell scripting and jQuery

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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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

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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

User · Answer

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

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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

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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

User · Answer

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

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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    gt          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

[javascript] How to execute shell command in Javascript

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