Node.JS Child Process Change Type of Terminal

May 2, 2022

I’m using the Node JS child process to execute terminal commands and get the output of them, which is all going great. However, I’m on a WSL Windows machine, and I would like to change the type of the child processes terminal to zsh.

Below is my current code for executing a command and receiving the output.

async function execute(
    command: string,
    cwd: string,
): Promise<{ output: string; error: string }> {
    const out = await promisify(exec)(command, { cwd: cwd });

    const output = out.stdout.trim();
    const error = out.stderr.trim();

    return { output: output, error: error };
}

How can I change the type of the terminal from command prompt to zsh?

>Solution :

you can do this

exec(command , { shell : "zsh" })

you can read more about shell requirements here : https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html#shell-requirements

So your code should look like this :

async function execute(
    command: string,
    cwd: string,
): Promise<{ output: string; error: string }> {
    const out = await promisify(exec)(command, { cwd: cwd , 
    shell:"zsh"});

    const output = out.stdout.trim();
    const error = out.stderr.trim();

    return { output: output, error: error };
}