[erlang-questions] Calling halt() only after I/O has completed.

[sand@REDACTED]

I have small escript that reads a bunch of files, scans them for data,
and prints the matches to stdout ('standard_io', to be precise, going
to the 'user' process under the hood).  If there were any matches,
then we have an error condition and the escript needs to return a
status of 1 to the shell.

If there are only a few matches, things work.  If there are many
matches, then the main process calls halt(1) while the I/O process is
still sending the text to the terminal and the output gets truncated.
The only way I have found to work around this is to insert a delay
scaled by the number of records (100 ms seems to work).  Calling

  file:close(user)

to synchronously close the port and flush the output doesn't work.
The top-level process just hangs.

What's the best solution for guaranteeing that all the data gets
printed before the program exits?  This is with ERTS 5.5.4 on Linux.

Thanks,

Derek

-- 
Derek Upham
sand@REDACTED