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

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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.

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