Yes, you can. With child_process.spawn. While child_process.exec executes the command and buffers the output, spawn gives you events on data, error and end. So you can listen to that and calculate your progress. There's a basic example in the node docs for spawn.
Update: I saw your other question. You can use wget for this, but I recommend the nodejs module request instead. Here's how to fetch the file with request:
var request = require("request");
request(url, function(err, res, body) {
// Do funky stuff with body
});
If you want to track progress, you pass a callback to onResponse:
function trackProgress(err, res) {
if(err)
return console.error(err);
var contentLength = parseInt(res.headers["content-length"], 10),
received = 0, progress = 0;
res.on("data", function(data) {
received += data.length;
progress = received / contentLength;
// Do funky stuff with progress
});
}
request({url: url, onResponse: trackProgress}, function(err, res, body) {
// Do funky stuff with body
});