Calling PowerShell from NodeJS

Question

I'm attempting to get the owner of a file in Node.js on Windows. In the absence of a win32api, I thought I'd use a PowerShell command:

powershell -Command "(get-acl test.txt).owner"

This works perfectly from the command-line and from a batch file, but just hangs with Node.js exec() :

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

exec('powershell -Command "(get-acl test.txt).owner"', function(err,sysout,syserr) {
    console.dir(sysout);
});

The PowerShell process just appears to start and never terminate.

Does anybody have:

1. an idea on why the command won't return in Node.js, or preferably
2. a sane way for me to get a file owner with Node.js on Windows?

Answer 1

When you are calling Powershell like that you need to the close the input stream. You may want to try using spawn and use stdin.end() .

Other option is to call cmd /c dir /q <file> but that output is verbose.