Spawning process with arguments in node.js

node.js process spawn
Industrial picture Industrial · Oct 8, 2012 · Viewed 29.3k times · Source

I need to spawn a child process from node.js, whilst using ulimit to keep it from using to much memory.

Following the docs, it wasn't hard to get the basic spawn working: child = spawn("coffee", ["app.coffee"]).

However, doing what I do below just makes the spawn die silently.

child = spawn("ulimit", ["-m 65536;", "coffee app.coffee"])

If I would run ulimit -m 65536; coffee app.coffee - it works as intented.

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer

vinayr picture vinayr · Oct 8, 2012

Those are two different commands. Don't club them if you are using spawn. Use separate child processes.

 child1 = spawn('ulimit', ['-m', '65536']);
 child2 = spawn('coffee', ['app.coffee']);

If you are not interested in output stream(if you want just buffered output) you can use exec.

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

child = exec('ulimit -m 65536; coffee app.coffee',
  function (error, stdout, stderr) {
    console.log('stdout: ' + stdout);
  }
});

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