exit

A replacement for process.exit that ensures stdio are fully drained before exiting.

To make a long story short, if process.exit is called on Windows, script output is often truncated when pipe-redirecting stdout or stderr. This module attempts to work around this issue by waiting until those streams have been completely drained before actually calling process.exit.

See Node.js issue #3584 for further reference.

Tested in OS X 10.8, Windows 7 on Node.js 0.8.25 and 0.10.18.

Based on some code by @vladikoff.

Getting Started

Install the module with: npm install exit

var exit = require('exit');

// These lines should appear in the output, EVEN ON WINDOWS.
console.log("foo");
console.error("bar");

// process.exit(5);
exit(5);

// These lines shouldn't appear in the output.
console.log("foo");
console.error("bar");

Don't believe me? Try it for yourself.

In Windows, clone the repo and cd to the test\fixtures directory. The only difference between log.js and log-broken.js is that the former uses exit while the latter calls process.exit directly.

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>node log.js 0 10 stdout stderr 2>&1 | find "std"
[stdout] testing 0
[stderr] testing 0
[stdout] testing 1
[stderr] testing 1
[stdout] testing 2
[stderr] testing 2
[stdout] testing 3
[stderr] testing 3
[stdout] testing 4
[stderr] testing 4
[stdout] testing 5
[stderr] testing 5
[stdout] testing 6
[stderr] testing 6
[stdout] testing 7
[stderr] testing 7
[stdout] testing 8
[stderr] testing 8
[stdout] testing 9
[stderr] testing 9

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>node log-broken.js 0 10 stdout stderr 2>&1 | find "std"

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

2013-09-20 - v0.1.0 - Initial release.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 "Cowboy" Ben Alman
Licensed under the MIT license.