a safe way to upgrade all of your globally-installed npm packages

npm-upgrade-bleeding.sh

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -x

for package in $(npm -g outdated --parseable --depth=0 | cut -d: -f3)
do
    npm -g install "$package"
done

npm-upgrade.sh

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -x

for package in $(npm -g outdated --parseable --depth=0 | cut -d: -f2)
do
    npm -g install "$package"
done

The Wanted version shall be another major version, which is not very favorable, since it can break things.

Here is a way to upgrade only minor versions of global packages:

npm_global_packages=($(npm list -g --depth 0 | awk '/ /{print $2}'))
for val in "${npm_global_packages[@]}"; do
    npm i -g --force $(echo $val | tr "." "\n" | head -1)
done

more context

Good part is, that it will not bump npm to a version that is incompatible with the current node version, so this will most likely not break.