Question

I have a NodeJS script that ‘exec’s a child process to capture cat dump of a file:

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
var result = '';
var child = exec('./scripts/first.sh',function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    result = stdout.split("=");
});

If in case the file is not there I would take dump of a different file:

var result = '';
var child = exec('./scripts/first.sh',function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    result = stdout.split("=");
    if(stdout.indexOf('No such file or directory') != -1){
        var child = exec('./scripts/second.sh', function(err, stdout, stderr) {
            result = stdout.split("=");
    });
});

Finally I log the value of result variable:

console.log(result);

The files would have data like mentioned below:

line_1 = 7888
line_2 = 8998
line_3 = 9090
line_4 = 9097

I need to parse and extract values of line_1 and line_3?

The result variable does not shows any value. My idea was to get the stdout data in a string variable and use some search mechanism.

Though I am not sure of the approach as I am not much experience on JS / NodeJS.

==EDIT==

Please find a replica of the function I have written.

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

function getdetail() {
        var result = '';
        var child = exec('./scripts/first.sh', function(err, stdout, stderr) {
                if(stdout.indexOf('No such file or directory') != -1){
                        var child = exec('./scripts/second.sh',function(err, stdout, stderr) {
                        result = stdout.toString().split("=");
                        console.log(result);
                        });
                }
                else
                {
                        result = stdout.toString().split("=");
                        console.log(result);
                }
        });
}

The tostring() on stdout stream object did the trick but I get console logs as mentioned below:

[ 'spawn ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile',
  '/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking',
  'no [e-mail] cat ver.txt\r\nWarning: Permanently added \'www.mybox.com,XX.XX.XX.XX\' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.\r\r\[e-mail]\'s password: \r\line_1',
  '9400\r\nline_2',
  '3508\r\nline_3',
  '77f3\r\nline_4',
  '/tmp\r\nline_5',
  '/tmp/ramdisk/\r\nline_5',
  '77f3\r\n' ]

How can I extract value of line_1 and line_3?

Answer 1

exec is asynchronous. Thus, if you write something like:

var result = '';
var child = exec('...'), function() { result = 'abc'; } );
console.log(result);

Then result maybe be empty, since console.log(result) can and often will get executed before exec returns to its callback and fill in the new value.

To fix this, you need to process the result asynchronously in the exec’s callback function.

Also I’m not sure if the way you check for errors is the best possible. Instead of checking for “no such file or directory”, you could simply test if err has non-null value:

if(err) {

Putting this all together we end up with the following code:

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

var result = '';
var processResult = function(stdout) {
    var result = stdout.split("=");
    console.log(result);
};

var child = exec('./scripts/first.sh',function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    if(err) {
        var child = exec('./scripts/second.sh', function(err, stdout, stderr) {                         
            processResult(stdout);
        });
    } else {            
        processResult(stdout);
    }
});

If you need to further process the stdout data, you need to iterate through it to find out all possible occurences of strings containing “key=value”. Here is a rough idea:

var processResult = function(stdout) {  
    var lines = stdout.toString().split('\n');
    var results = new Array();
    lines.forEach(function(line) {
        var parts = line.split('=');
        results[parts[0]] = parts[1];
    });

    console.log(results);
};

I hope this gets you started.