wtf is noop-process?

noop-process is a small JavaScript utility that creates a "do-nothing" background process on your computer and hands you its process ID (PID). It exists mainly for testing purposes, sometimes you need a real, living process sitting around so you can practice finding it, monitoring it, or shutting it down. You install it via npm, call the function, and it returns a number identifying the new process. You can optionally give that process a custom title (up to 15 characters) so it's easy to spot in system tools or target it with commands like killall. By default, these helper processes are cleaned up automatically when your main program exits, though you can also shut them down early with a separate cleanup function. A few extra options let you control how the process behaves. You can make it persist after your main program ends, or mark it as "only force-killable", meaning normal shutdown signals won't work and you'd need a stronger kill command to stop it. The people who'd reach for this are developers building or testing tools that interact with system processes. For example, if you're writing a process manager, a monitoring dashboard, or a script that needs to gracefully handle stuck programs, you need realistic test cases, real processes you can hunt down and terminate. This package gives you those processes on demand without having to spin up something complex. It's a narrow, utility-focused tool: it doesn't do anything beyond creating and managing these placeholder processes. The design tradeoff is simplicity over features, which makes sense given that its sole job is to exist as a target for whatever process-handling code you're testing.