Mention platform-independent scripts

[tomek-he-him]

”

Many npm scripts depend on Unix-only or bash-only features. If you want to make sure your scripts are platform-independent, keep to two rules:

• Only use cross-shell operators: >, >>, < and | – they work in bash, fish, the windows command prompt and others.
• Instead of platform-specific tools use node modules with a CLI – for example mkdirp instead of mkdir, cpy instead of cp, mve instead of mv.

[tomek-he-him]

By the way, I don’t know of any sensible shell-independent alternative to ;, && and ||. Here’s my idea: tomek-he-him/ideas#1.

What do you think? @mattdesl @npm-scripts @hemanth @stoeffel

[hemanth]

'npm test' --and 'echo ✓' --or 'echo Test failed!!!' --then 'npm run build'

Sounds very right to me 👍

[mattdesl]

Nice, thanks for the PR! 👍

It would be great to have a separate repo that collects some information on compatibility. e.g. It might list operators/commands that work on unix + windows, and then list some modules that can be used as alternatives (like cp), and tools that can be used like your --or idea, and parallelshell.

[tomek-he-him]

By the way, I don’t know of any sensible shell-independent alternative to ;, && and ||. Here’s my idea: tomek-he-him/ideas#1.

It seems that it’s OK to use && and || after all. I sometimes just take info I find on stackoverflow for granted. But it turns out that this time an answer was wrong: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ntcmds_shelloverview.mspx?mfr=true.