openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix CLI: openclaw message send hangs indefinitely after successful delivery

Bug: openclaw message send CLI hangs indefinitely after successful delivery

Version

OpenClaw 2026.5.27 (27ae826)

Description

openclaw message send successfully delivers the message to Discord but the CLI process never exits. The node.js process remains in ep_poll (epoll_wait) state with 7 threads and 2 unix sockets open to the gateway.

Reproduction

# This hangs forever (message IS delivered to Discord)
openclaw message send --channel discord --target "channel:<channel_id>" -m "test" --json

# Must be killed manually or with timeout
timeout 10 openclaw message send --channel discord --target "channel:<channel_id>" -m "test" --json

Evidence: Other message subcommands exit cleanly

Process state while hung

State: S (sleeping)
Threads: 7
wchan: ep_poll
Open fds: 2 unix sockets (ESTAB) to gateway, 1 eventpoll, 1 io_uring, 1 pipe, 1 eventfd
No TCP connections (gateway communication is via unix socket)

Impact

This breaks codex-discord-send bridge scripts used by Codex sandbox agents (stuart-coder, etc.). These agents are instructed to send Discord progress updates via:

codex-discord-send --channel general --message "progress update"

Which internally calls openclaw message send. Since the process never exits, the Codex sandbox treats it as a hung command and the agent either times out or skips subsequent Discord updates.

Result: Codex agents never send progress updates to Discord threads, despite the messages actually being delivered.

Current workaround

timeout 10 openclaw message send ... || true

The || true is needed because timeout kills the process with exit code 124.

Suspected root cause

The CLI loads the discord plugin out-of-process for send. After the gateway delivers the message, the plugin's event loop / connection is not properly cleaned up (no client.destroy() or process.exit() call on the send code path). Other actions (read, thread create) either use a different code path or properly close their connections.