Is it possible to start and continue to capture output from a certain bash process with node? For example: say I was run tail /some/file, how can I keep listening to every new line printed and act on the output?
For completeness, I've added this answer as well.
You can use child_process.spawn to spawn a process and monitor it's output. However, for a command like tail, cat, etc that don't run long or continuously you can just use child_process.exec and it will capture the entire output for stdout and stderr and give it to you all at once.
var cp = require("child_process");
cp.exec("tail /some/file", function (err, stdout, stderr) {
// If an error occurred, err will contain that error object
// The output for the command itself is held in stdout and stderr vars
});
var spawn = require('child_process').spawn,
tail = spawn('tail', ['-f', '/tmp/somefile']);
tail.stdout.pipe(process.stdout);
child_process module is well documented