Backed by mandō

Every background process. Accounted for.

Dispatch is the background intelligence platform that gives you total visibility into every running, stopped, and completed job. No more blind spots. No more guesswork. Just pure operational clarity.

Start Dispatching → See Demo

4.2M+ jobs tracked

<1ms status latency

99.97% uptime SLA

dispatch

$ dispatch

[1] Running sleep 300 &

[2]- Stopped vim notes.txt

[3]+ Running node server.js &

$ dispatch -l

[1] 12847 Running sleep 300 &

[2]- 12903 Stopped vim notes.txt

[3]+ 12945 Running node server.js &

Features

Background work, fully illuminated

Six high-leverage capabilities that give you complete command over every process running behind the scenes.

🔍

Deep Inspect

Unlock full process intelligence with PIDs, states, and command lineage for every background task. Go beyond surface-level status with -l.

🔔

Delta Sync

Only surfaces what's changed since your last notification. Zero noise, pure signal. The -n flag is your north star for async awareness.

🎯

PID Direct

Extract raw process group leader identifiers with -p for surgical precision. Pipe directly into your automation stack.

▶️

Active Filter

Instantly isolate running processes from the noise. The -r flag shows you only what's alive and executing right now.

⏸️

Pause Detection

Surface every stopped process hiding in your background with -s. Nothing stays silent. Every suspended task gets accounted for.

🏷️

Smart Selectors

Target any job with precision addressing. By number (%1), by recency (%+, %-), or by name fragment (%string, %?string).

How It Works

Four steps to total visibility

From zero to full background observability in under a minute.

Launch Your Processes

Start any background task. Dispatch automatically registers and begins tracking every job in your current session environment.

Query Your Fleet

Run dispatch to get an instant snapshot. See job numbers, current/previous markers (+/-), states, and the originating commands.

Filter & Focus

Use flags to slice the data. Running only? Stopped only? PIDs only? Changed since last check? Dispatch surfaces exactly what you need.

Act With Precision

Target specific jobs using Smart Selectors and pipe into your workflow. Bring jobs foreground, send signals, or compose into larger automations.

The Background Work Manifesto

Your most important work happens where nobody's watching.

Every production-critical system depends on background processes. Data pipelines, build servers, long-running computations — the invisible army that keeps the modern stack alive. And yet, for decades, the industry has treated background job visibility as an afterthought.

We started Dispatch because we believe that what runs in the background defines what succeeds in the foreground. If you can't see it, you can't manage it. If you can't manage it, you're just hoping. Hope is not an engineering strategy.

Dispatch gives you certainty. Every job. Every state. Every time.

Pricing

Plans for every workload

Start free. Scale as your background operations grow.

Starter

Free

For individuals exploring background visibility.

Basic dispatch (list all jobs)
Up to 5 concurrent jobs
Job number & state display
Community support

Get Started

Trusted by operators who ship

"Before Dispatch, we had zero visibility into stopped processes. Literally flying blind. Delta Sync alone saved our on-call team dozens of hours a sprint."

Chen Wei VP of Platform Engineering, ScaleForge

"PID Direct is a game-changer for our CI pipeline. We extract process group leaders and pipe them directly into our monitoring stack. Best-in-class."

Clara Holmgren CTO, NovaBuild

"Smart Selectors completely changed how I think about job targeting. %?string matching alone is worth the subscription. 10x productivity unlock."

Cleo Whitfield Solo Developer & Indie Hacker

"We run 200+ background jobs per node. Dispatch's Active Filter lets our SREs isolate running processes in <1ms. Ruthless efficiency."

Daniel Kovacs Head of Infrastructure, DataMesh

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What job states does Dispatch track?

Dispatch monitors five distinct states: Running, Done, Done(code) for non-zero exits, Stopped, and Stopped with specific signal attribution (SIGTSTP, SIGSTOP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU). Every state transition is captured and reported.

Is my data secure?

Absolutely. Dispatch operates entirely within your session environment. Process information never leaves your context. We take background job security as seriously as you do — SOC 2 Type II compliance is in progress.

What's the difference between %+ and %-?

The %+ selector (also %%) targets the current job — the one that would be used as default for foreground or background operations. The %- selector targets the previous job — the one that would become default if the current default were to exit. It's priority-aware job addressing, built in.

Can I integrate Dispatch with my existing tooling?

Yes. Use PID Direct (-p) to extract process group IDs and pipe them into any automation workflow. Common patterns include $(dispatch -p) for implementation-independent process group references.

What happens when a job completes?

When Dispatch reports a job's termination status, the process ID is automatically removed from the known process list. Done jobs display their exit code, and signal-terminated jobs show the signal that caused termination. Clean, automatic lifecycle management.