debugging - How to programmatically detect debug mode in nodejs?

Question

I've seen this question asked of other platform/languages - any ideas? I'd like to do something like:

if (detectDebug())
{
    require('tty').setRawMode(true);    
    var stdin = process.openStdin();

    stdin.on('keypress', function (chunk, key) {
        DoWork();
    }
}
else
{
    DoWork();
}

I'd like to be able to toggle keyboard input as a start for the script when debugging so that I can have a moment to fire up chrome to listen to my node-inspector port.

***Quick update - I'm guessing I can actually use "process.argv" to detect if --debug was passed in. Is this the best/right way?

Answer 1

NodeJS creates a v8debug global object when running in debug mode: node debug script.js

So, a possible solution would be:

var debug = typeof v8debug === 'object';

For my use case, I use it because I want to avoid passing environment variables. My main node process starts child node processes and I want a node debug mainScript.js to trigger debug mode for children as well (again, without passing env variables to child processes)