node-spawn-async VS rimraf

One thing that surprised me about Node was how slow the default way to shelling out (child_process) could be (probably https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/14917).

Although according to the linked issue, it has been "fixed", I still ran into a problem during a batch script that was calling imagemagick through a shell for each file in a massive directory; profiling was telling me that starting (not completing) (yes, I was using the async version) the child process increasingly slows, from sub-millisecond for the first few spawns, to eventually hundreds of milliseconds or seconds... Eventually I had to resort to doing only single spawn a bash script that in turn did all the shelling out.

It seems that the linked execa still relies on child_process and therefore has the same issue. It saddens me to see the only package for node that appears to actually fix this and provide a workaround seems to be https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/node-spawn-async and unmaintained.

And npmjs.com will block your IP if you do too many downloads in on day.

Actually is says 86m a week here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/rimraf

Huge thanks to Isaacs! Rimraf comes to the rescue, providing a reliable solution for deep, recursive removal of folders and files. At PURISTA, we rely on rimraf to maintain pristine build output directories.

Avoid platform-specific commands: Avoid using platform-specific commands in your scripts. Use cross-platform tools like Node.js or Bash to ensure that your scripts work on different platforms. For instance, if you want your npm script to remove a certain directory using the rm -rf command, this would work perfectly on a Linux or Mac machine but would error out on Windows. To avoid this, you can use a cross-platform package such as [rimraf](https://www.npmjs.com/package/rimraf).

rimraf

Babel will overwrite but not delete any existing files or directories in the output directory. To be sure the lib folder doesn’t contain old files you can delete it before transpiling. To do this automatically you can install rimraf and add it to the transpile script like this:

Many packages on npm are designed to make changes to the file-system, such as rimraf or a code linter. In an accident, the consequences of running file-system altering code can be detrimental.

Also, rimraf seems to be popular.

No, that's why there's a bunch of packages such as rimraf[0] that implements that sort of functionality in a cross-platform way that most people use in their scripts

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/rimraf

Something that might work: rimraf. A small node script can churn through file deletion surprisingly fast on Windows. Used to use it to clear out npm packages directories at a greater than glacial pace.

Um actually I use rimraf