bash - How to detect if a Node.js script is running through a shell pipe?

Question

My question is similar to this one: How to detect if my shell script is running through a pipe?. The difference is that the shell script I’m working on is written in Node.js.

Let’s say I enter:

echo "foo bar" | ./test.js

Then how can I get the value "foo bar" in test.js?

I’ve read Unix and Node: Pipes and Streams but that only seems to offer an asynchronous solution (unless I’m mistaken). I’m looking for a synchronous solution. Also, with this technique, it doesn’t seem very straightforward to detect if the script is being piped or not.

TL;DR My question is two-fold:

1. How to detect if a Node.js script is running through a shell pipe, e.g. echo "foo bar" | ./test.js?
2. If so, how to read out the piped value in Node.js?

Answer 1

I just found out a simpler answer to part of my question.

To quickly and synchronously detect if piped content is being passed to the current script in Node.js, use the process.stdin.isTTY boolean:

$ node -p -e 'process.stdin.isTTY'
true
$ echo 'foo' | node -p -e 'process.stdin.isTTY'
undefined

So, in a script, you could do something like this:

if (process.stdin.isTTY) {
  // handle shell arguments
} else {
  // handle piped content (see Jerome’s answer)
}

The reason I didn’t find this before is because I was looking at the documentation for process, where isTTY is not mentioned at all. Instead, it’s mentioned in the TTY documentation.