TUturadg·Aug 4, 2025
Execa package works nicely for that. Zx has a good DX but is YA runtime.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/execa/blob/main/docs/bash.md
In Modern Node.js Patternssindresorhus
execa
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sindresorhus / execa
execa
Process execution for humans
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Process execution for humans
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5 sourcesExeca: Process Execution for Humans in Node.js
3 points · Open discussionYeah, or over https://github.com/sindresorhus/execa?
And given the existence of those npm packages, is there any aspect of Bun Shell that required it to be built into the Bun runtime instead of published to npm?
In The Bun ShellFor something which works across all JS runtimes (Deno, Node) and achieves basically the same, check out the popular JS library Execa[1]. Works like a charm!
Another alternative is the ZX shell[2] JS library. Tho haven't tested it.
[1]: https://github.com/sindresorhus/execa
[2]: https://github.com/google/zx
In The Bun Shell- Most Node code I encounter that uses “streams” gets something wrong. Usually minor, sometimes major stuff like forgetting errors exist altogether, or to reject a promise wrapper when an error occurs.
- Incorrect use of concurrency stuff like process.nextTick. This function probably doesn’t do what you think it does based on the function name - it won’t “yield to the event loop”.
- for years Buffer and friends was totally busted, these days Buffer has deprecated insecure APIs and uses an internal object pool to avoid the worst of performance issues.
- until Node 12, async stack traces didn’t work and needed to be copied manually for understandable errors.
- anecdotally, whenever I review a popular library I often find some issue where the library papers over incorrectness in order to expose a simpler, more appealing API. For example when
Read the rest
I reviewed the popular NPM package execa for executing subprocesses, it put a NodeJS stream based on a Unix pipe into the subprocesses stderr with no way out, even when you request it to connect the parent process stderr directly. This will break with EPIPE if the subprocess writes too much data. But who cares, we get to see stderr in the exception thrown if the command fails, so that’s a nice choice for adoption.
For a taste of how easy and common it is to get this kind of thing wrong, look at this issue in execa from 2019 - stream error handling leads to unresolved promise that hangs forever. Very hard to blame a programmer for using this API wrong. It is so easy to use wrong, and so hard to use correctly.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/execa/issues/350