During a long agentic task Claude Code is spinning in a loop — the sam — Claude Code Certified Professional Practice — Claude Cert Academy

During a long agentic task Claude Code is spinning in a loop — the same tool keeps being called repeatedly. A teammate suggests pressing Ctrl+C. Which behavior should you expect?

• Ctrl+C immediately kills the process and all child processes without cleanup
• Ctrl+C sends a soft interrupt that lets the current tool call finish, then pauses for human input
• Ctrl+C is equivalent to typing /exit and will end the session entirely
• Ctrl+C is ignored inside an agentic loop; you must use /abort

Answer: Ctrl+C sends a soft interrupt that lets the current tool call finish, then pauses for human input

Ctrl+C in Claude Code sends a soft interrupt. The running tool call completes first (to avoid leaving side effects half-done), then Claude pauses the agentic loop and returns control to the user for confirmation. It does not kill child processes unsafely. /exit closes the session but does not interrupt a running loop mid-step. There is no /abort command.

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