Processes pile up when Claude Code keeps stdin open

[shaharke]

Hey! I ran into something weird — after a while my machine started crawling and I found 35+ ccstatusline processes all sitting there doing nothing.

What's happening

Claude Code spawns a new ccstatusline process each refresh cycle but keeps the stdin pipe open without sending EOF. Since readStdin() waits for EOF before processing (for await (const chunk of process.stdin)), each process just hangs indefinitely. They pile up fast with a short refreshInterval.

You can reproduce it like this:

# keeps pipe open, like Claude Code does
(echo '<status-json>'; sleep 60) | ccstatusline
# hangs forever

Workaround I found

Wrapping with head -1 forces EOF after the first line and things work fine:

"statusLine": {
  "command": "bash -c 'head -1 | ccstatusline'"
}

Possible fix

Adding a read timeout in readStdin(), or resolving as soon as stdin goes idle, would probably handle this cleanly without needing the wrapper.

Not sure if this is also a Claude Code bug (it probably should close stdin), but figured it's worth flagging here too since ccstatusline could defend against it.

Thanks for the great tool!

[CorticalCode]

This looks like the same underlying bug as #420: readStdin()'s for await never returns when stdin EOF is delayed. @mrns reproduced it without Volta in #420 via sleep 30 | ccstatusline, so it is not Windows/Volta-specific. There is an open fix in #421 that adds a read timeout plus an explicit exit. It bounds the Node-side pileup, though it does not yet cover the Bun read path and has a couple of edge cases I left notes on in the PR. Cross-linking so the three threads stay connected.