Ctrl-C leaves nothing running

Press Ctrl-C and every process vx started is gone within two seconds.
No vite left holding port 5173, no tsc -w from last Tuesday.

Here a task starts two background sleeps. Shells ignore SIGINT in
background jobs, so these two won't stop on Ctrl-C by themselves:

serve: { exec: { command: 'sleep 301 & sleep 302 & wait' } }

5 runs, 2,008 to 2,011 ms · Linux x64 · vx 0be0367 · 2026-10-23

The two seconds are the grace period. Then vx sends SIGKILL.

The teardown

Each step has a time limit. Nothing is left as a zombie.

A second Ctrl-C skips the wait. A remote cache download in flight is
dropped, not waited on.

Every way a run ends goes through it

• A signal: SIGINT, SIGTERM or SIGHUP. A task runs in its own session, so a closing terminal reaches only vx, which passes it on.
• An abort: run() as a library call takes an AbortSignal.
• A readiness timeout: a dev server whose readyWhen never matched.
• A dev server exits: with three up, one exiting stops the others.
• The normal end: dev servers that other tasks needed stop when the graph is done.
• vx watch: Ctrl-C mid-cycle stops that cycle's children.

The tests are the claim

Each path has a test. It starts a real child, ends the run that way,
and checks the child is dead in time. A zombie counts as alive.

A task that calls vx run on its own workspace is refused, so two runs
never fight over the same children.

More at vznjs.github.io/vx.

Originally published on the vx blog. vx is open-source (MIT) task orchestration with a build cache: vznjs.github.io/vx · GitHub.

_{Written with AI assistance.}