NodeJs child_process working directory

Question

I am trying to execute a child process in a different directory then the one of its parent.

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

exec(
    'pwd',
    {
        cdw: someDirectoryVariable
    },
    function(error, stdout, stderr) {
        // ...
    }
);

I'm doing the above (though of course running "pwd" is not what I want to do in the end). This will end up writing the pwd of the parent process to stdout, regardless of what value I provided to the cdw option.

What am I missing?

(I did make sure the path passed as cwd option actually exists)

score 152 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 19 '13 at 14:52

152

The option is short for current working directory, and is spelled cwd, not cdw.

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
exec('pwd', {
  cwd: '/home/user/directory'
}, function(error, stdout, stderr) {
  // work with result
});

answered Sep 19 '13 at 14:52

hexacyanide

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5

Oh.. typo.. Now wondering how I did not spot that. Fixing the typo made the code work as expected. – Jeroen De Dauw Sep 19 '13 at 15:18
4

Doesn't seem to be working. On windows 10, not sure if that matters – Matt Westlake May 17 '18 at 17:43
@Matt Westlake I know I'm probably late but I think on Windows you need to execute `cd` instead of `pwd` like so `var cmd = \`cd foo/bar ⏎ ls\`; var exec = require('child_process').exec; ...` – vbtheory Jul 02 '19 at 08:26
@Jeroen De Dauw lol, we've all been there – Lennon McLean Jan 11 '21 at 13:21
@vbtheory Worth noting that there's also no `ls` on Windows (it's `dir` instead) and directory separators are backslashes, not forward slashes. – Clonkex Feb 28 '22 at 23:37
can i enter the windows path "c:\\"? its not working for me – Amir Alam May 25 '22 at 05:54

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 02 '22 at 06:14

If you're on windows you might choke on the path separators. You can get around that by using the join function from the built-in Node.js path module. Here is @hexacyanide's answer but with execSync and join instead of exec (which doesn't block the event loop, but not always a huge deal for scripts) and Unix file paths (which are cooler and better than Window file paths).

const { execSync } = require('child_process');
const { join } = require('path');
exec('pwd', { cwd: path.join('home', 'user', 'directory') });

NodeJs child_process working directory

2 Answers2

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