Question

I’m not so experienced in async javascript. How can I call the commands without hardcoding the amount of commands or using eval?

var commands = [
    // command 1: result: 0, stdout: ""
    function (stdin, callback) {
        callback(0, "");
    },
    // command 2: result: 1, stdout: ""
    function (stdin, callback) {
        callback(1, "");
    },
    // command 3: result: 0, stdout: ""
    function (stdin, callback) {
        callback(0, "");
    },
    // ...
];

var stdin = "foo";
var end = function (result, stdout) {
    console.log(result);
    console.log(stdout);
};

commands[0](stdin, function (result, stdout) {
    commands[1](stdout, function (result, stdout) {
        commands[2](stdout, end);
    });
});

Answer 1

Final answer:

I’m using recursion to go through the commands array.
You pass the loop function an array of commands and the last callback to be called (you can also pass as a fourth optional parameter the index of the array in which you wish to start the loop – defaults to zero).

var commands = [
    // echo foo
    function (stdin, callback) {
        callback(0, "foo");
    },
    // touppercase
    function (stdin, callback) {
        callback(1, stdin.toUpperCase());
    }
];

var stdin   = "",
    loop    = function(commands, lastCallback, stdin, startIndex) {
        (function insideLoop(i, stdout) {
            commands[i](stdout, (i + 1 < commands.length) ? function(result, stdout){ insideLoop(i + 1, stdout); } : lastCallback); 
        })(startIndex || 0, stdin);
    },
    end     = function (result, stdout) {
        console.log(stdout);
    };

loop(commands, end, stdin);

Code Example