Equivalent of Rake's 'sh' for Jake? - node.js

Question

I've got some experience with Ruby and Rake, but now I'm working on a Node project and want to learn how to do the same things with Jake.
Ruby has a system function that will shell out to a command and wait for it to exit. Rake extends this by adding an sh function that will additionally throw an error if the child process returned a nonzero exit code (or couldn't be found at all). sh is really handy for Rake tasks that shell out to things like compilers or test frameworks, because it automatically terminates the task as soon as anything fails.
Node doesn't seem to have anything like system or sh -- it looks like the nearest equivalents are child_process.spawn and child_process.exec, but neither of them wires up STDOUT or STDERR, so you can't see any output from the child process unless you do some extra work.
What's the best way to get an sh method for Jake? (Though since this is Node, I'd expect it to be async, rather than blocking until the command returns like Ruby does.) Is there an npm module that has already invented this particular wheel, or does someone have a code sample that does this?
I've already seen sh.js, but it looks awfully heavyweight for this (it tries to build an entire command interpreter in Node), and it doesn't look like it's async (though the docs don't say one way or the other).
I'm looking for something that I could use more or less like this (using Jake's support for async tasks):
file('myprogram', ['in.c'], function() {
// sh(command, args, successCallback)
sh('gcc', ['in.c', '-o', 'myprogram'], function() {
// sh should throw if gcc couldn't be found or returned nonzero.
// So if we got here, we can tell Jake our task completed successfully.
complete();
});
}, true);

Answer 1

Here's some code I've come up with that seems to work well. (But if anyone has a better answer, or knows of an existing npm module that already does this, please add another answer.)
Supports full shell syntax, so you can use | and < and > to pipe and redirect output, you can run Windows batch files, etc.
Displays output (both STDOUT and STDERR) as the child process generates it, so you see incremental output as the command runs.
No limitation on the amount of output the command can generate (unlike a previous exec-based version of this code).
Cross-platform (works on Windows, should work on Mac/Linux as well). I borrowed the platform-specific-shell (if platform === 'win32') technique from npm.
Here's the code:
function sh(command, callback) {
var shell = '/bin/sh', args = ['-c', commandLine], child;
if (process.platform === 'win32') {
shell = 'cmd';
args = ['/c', commandLine];
}
child = child_process.spawn(shell, args);
child.stdout.pipe(process.stdout);
child.stderr.pipe(process.stderr);
child.on('exit', function(code, signal) {
if (signal != null)
throw new Error("Process terminated with signal " + signal);
if (code !== 0)
throw new Error("Process exited with error code " + code);
callback();
});
};