Running a shell command from Node.js without buffering output

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You can inherit stdin/out/error streams via spawn argument so you don’t need to pipe them manually:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
spawn('ls', [], { stdio: 'inherit' });

Use shell for shell syntax – for bash it’s -c parameter to read script from string:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
var shellSyntaxCommand = 'ls -l | grep test | wc -c';
spawn('sh', ['-c', shellSyntaxCommand], { stdio: 'inherit' });

To summarise:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
function shspawn(command) {
   spawn('sh', ['-c', command], { stdio: 'inherit' });
} 

shspawn('ls -l | grep test | wc -c');

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