I wouldn't use it as an interactive prompt personally - it's a bit too verbose - though I did know someone in college who did that :) Calling shell commands is

I wouldn't use it as an interactive prompt personally - it's a bit too verbose - though I did know someone in college who did that :) Calling shell commands is reasonably straightforward: const { exec} = require('child_process') const child = exec('ls', ['-lh', '/usr']) console.log('error', child.error) console.log('stdout ', child.stdout) console.log('stderr ', child.stderr) However, you can also get cool packages like this to use instead: https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs I will admit though that in most of the cases where I've used it I didn't really do any shelling-out, so I can't speak much to how that experience scales in practice. Mostly I was either 1) doing self-contained logic with files, web requests, etc, or 2) delegating out to JS build tools (which even when they have a CLI, almost always expose a nice JS API too). Ymmv, etc.