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Check cwd before spawning child process #11520
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That's going to be difficult because the error needs to bubble up from a long way down. I don't think it can be done without backwards-incompatible changes to libuv, which means it won't happen before libuv v2.0.
That's going to be difficult because the error needs to bubble up from a long way down
This means that checking the cwd beforehand (with
fs.existsfor instance) is not an option?No, that's prone to race conditions (TOCTOU issues.) It's going to work alright 99% of the time and that might be acceptable for an npm module but requirements for node.js core are more stringent.
How about add an option
checkCWD?something like:
.spawn(path, { cwd: "some/cwd", checkCWD: true });
Check-before-use is an anti-pattern. It's not something to codify in the API.
Reacted by Remi Liu and Mila Rodriguez@mrpeu Probably because you use
~in the file path. No shell expansion is done.Reacted by MrPeuCheck-before-use is an anti-pattern.
@bnoordhuis why is that?
- Reacted by Gibson Fahnestock, MrPeu, Mila Rodriguez and Zxilly
Doesn't the current code follow
TOCTOU? (though the window between TOC and TOU is narrow)Given the error is captured right and only issue is with the error message, how about making this explicit in the doc?
Could you do a check after the fact simply for the purpose of giving a better error message? i.e. if you get an ENOENT, check if the cwd exists, if not then give an error message specific to that. In the worst case you provide a wrong error message, but not a wrong program behavior.
Reacted by Johannes Ewald, P. Roebuck, Pony CI and Govind RaiStill happening to me. Is there at least a manual way to work around this? Ubuntu on armv7.
@ctday You can check after the fact whether it is the cwd or the node executable that is ENOENT (use
fs.stat()).Ok, thanks.
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- added a commit that references this issue
on Jul 30, 2026
When a cwd is passed to
child_process.spawn()that does not exist, node just reportsENOENT:This error message is very confusing because it reads like
/usr/local/bin/nodedoes not exist. It took me several hours to debug this issue, including serious doubts in my sanity 😁.Do you think it is feasible to check the cwd before spawning the process, or is there a use-case/is it possible to spawn a process with a non-existent cwd? If it's not feasible, would it be an option to include the cwd in the error message to give a slight hint in the right direction?