Running a shell command from gulp

I would like to run a shell command from gulp, using gulp-shell. I see the following idiom being used the gulpfile.

Is this the idiomatic way to run a command from a gulp task?

var cmd = 'ls';
gulp.src('', {read: false})
    .pipe(shell(cmd, {quiet: true}))
    .on('error', function (err) {
       gutil.log(err);
});

Answer

gulp-shell has been blacklisted. You should use gulp-exec instead, which has also a better documentation.

For your case it actually states:

Note: If you just want to run a command, just run the command, don’t use this plugin:

var exec = require('child_process').exec;

gulp.task('task', function (cb) {
  exec('ping localhost', function (err, stdout, stderr) {
    console.log(stdout);
    console.log(stderr);
    cb(err);
  });
})