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.

Install the module with: npm install exit

var exit = require('exit');

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

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

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

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.

This test was done using cmd.exe, but you can see the same results using | grep "std" in either PowerShell or git-bash.

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

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

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>

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.

2013-11-26 - v0.1.2 - Fixed a bug with hanging processes.
2013-09-26 - v0.1.1 - Fixed some bugs. It seems to actually work now!
2013-09-20 - v0.1.0 - Initial release.

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