ncu -g fails with Snap binary: child_process.spawn produces empty string

[kleinfreund]

• Version: v12.1.0
• Platform: Linux RAUMSTATION 5.0.0-13-generic test: increase --stack-size to prevent child process failure on ARM #14-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 15 14:59:14 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Subsystem: child process (?)

I switched from the PPA binary (https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md#debinstall) to the snap binary (https://snapcraft.io/node). This started to break the ncu -g command. Originally, I opened an issue with npm-check-updates, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue on their end (for reference: raineorshine/npm-check-updates#536).

Only with the snap binary do I get the following error:

/home/phil/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/npm-check-updates/lib/npm-check-updates.js:387
        throw err;
        ^

Error: Expected JSON from "npm ls". This could be due to npm instability.


    at parseJson (/home/phil/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/npm-check-updates/lib/package-managers/npm.js:38:15)
    at /home/phil/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/npm-check-updates/lib/package-managers/npm.js:144:30
    at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:89:5)

The command that is executed with child_process.spawn is npm ls --global --depth=0 --json which produces the correct JSON with both the PPA and the snap binary when executed directly from the terminal.

[mscdex]

This should be posted to NodeSource's issue tracker instead.