Orphan processes remain after closing terminal (iTerm/PyCharm)
Description
When closing the terminal application (iTerm2, PyCharm terminal) without explicitly exiting Claude Code, the Claude processes become orphaned and continue running in the background, consuming significant memory.
Steps to Reproduce
- Open Claude Code in iTerm2 or PyCharm terminal
- Use Claude Code normally
- Close the terminal window or quit the application directly (without running
/exitorCtrl+C) - Check Activity Monitor or run
ps aux | grep claude
Expected Behavior
Claude Code processes should terminate when the parent terminal is closed.
Actual Behavior
Claude processes continue running as orphan processes. Over time (days), dozens of processes accumulate, consuming significant memory (observed 3.4GB+ for a single process, with 20+ orphan processes total).
Example from ps aux:
username 63707 100.2 10.1 515016720 3397904 ?? R 금07오전 43:07.66 claude
username 63462 10.2 0.6 509344192 204832 ?? S 금07오전 69:49.41 claude
username 73132 7.8 0.6 510144016 196144 ?? S 금09오전 59:50.86 claude
... (20+ more processes from previous days)
Environment
- OS: macOS (Darwin 25.2.0)
- Terminal: iTerm2, PyCharm integrated terminal
- Claude Code version: Latest (as of 2025-01-24)
- Notification settings:
preferredNotifChannel: "iterm2_with_bell"
Workaround
Users can manually kill orphan processes:
pkill -9 claude
Or exit properly before closing terminal:
- Use
/exitcommand in Claude Code - Use
Ctrl+CthenCtrl+D
Suggestion
Claude Code should handle SIGHUP signal properly or set up a mechanism to detect when the parent terminal is gone and self-terminate.
This issue has 3 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗