process.exit() terminates immediately, but Node writes stdout asynchronously
when stdout is a pipe — everything still buffered is dropped. scan-orchestrator
measured 246 854 bytes to a file against 65 536 to a pipe (131 072 on another
run; the cut point is a flush race), so every machine consumer that pipes the
envelope got truncated, unparseable JSON. The failure reads like a corrupt file,
not like a cut-off, which is what made it survive this long. Reported by
org-ops, whose census pipes our output.
Closes the class rather than the one CLI where it was visible. campaign-cli,
campaign-export-cli, campaign-write-cli, knowledge-refresh-cli, drift-cli and
fix-cli all exited the same way on their success paths and were green only
because their payloads fit the pipe buffer today; size is not correctness. All
38 sites across 14 files now set process.exitCode and return, which is the
pattern self-audit.mjs already used.
Two contracts needed care rather than substitution: fail() is a never-returns
guard at ~25 call sites, so it throws a CliUsageError the top-level catch
renders with the identical "Error: " prefix and exit code 3; the path guards
needed an explicit return so main() stops instead of running on. Exit codes and
stderr text are unchanged, and the frozen v5.0.0 snapshots are untouched.
The class sweep is landed as a test, not as fourteen edits — it caught one site
this commit had missed. Suite 1443/0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01B8sS1DuDV6bUJcyumLwbvj
