Node, when I run package.json `bin` `command` , give me `syntax error near unexpected token `(' `

The documentation states that:

On install, npm will symlink that file into prefix/bin for global installs, or ./node_modules/.bin/ for local installs.

This means that npm does nothing special to your file and expect it to be executable on unix. Your bin file can be a perl script, a compiled C program, a shell script, a Ruby script or even a node.js javascript app.

Therefore what causes your app to run is not npm. It is your OS. So your script must be executable (as I said, it can even be a compiled binary).

On unix, to automatically execute a script with the correct interpreter you need to have a sh-bang as the first line in the file. For node.js I generally use this line:

#! /usr/bin/env node

You can generally just use:

#! /whatever/path/to/node

but depending on the OS or even distro node.js may be installed at different locations. So /usr/bin/env is a program that loads your default environment variables which includes $PATH that will allow the shell to automatically find where node.js is installed.