WIN/PS - Insists on using sh - assumes linux/mac - assumes chat wants to tool
Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 17, 2025 by grymmjack Closed Aug 7, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (tibo-openai, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Tried this in Powershell -- needs some TLC
I don't use powershell as my default except on Windows. I'm sure this would have been OK in linux/mac (I'll test those too). I happened to be on Windows this morning because I was gaming last night before bed.
- Codex used my wsl installation to run commands (this is fine)
- It failed at using it though.
- It couldn't even figure out how to list the files using native Powershell and eventually used
git ls-files(clever)
Shouldn't codex know what OS it's on and leverage the shell it is currently running from?
dir, or such would have worked straight away- because codex knew it was possible to try
wslit must have also known it was running on Windows?
After this, I simply asked "What is the difference between o4-mini and o3-mini"
- It tried to treat these models as files by grepping for them.
- It eventually got it right that these were models.
This seems odd, and I know this is new so wanted to report it.
I love that you're providing us a CLI! It just needs some TLC and context awareness.
I'd suggest some basic awareness if it's not already in place:
- OS
- Current shell / parent process
- Environment variables from the OS
- Introspection on available tooling (gnu, native windows, native mac, whatever, and any available package managers brew, choco, npm, etc.)
- Perhaps a deeper introspection could be run at first start and later re-run to refresh it or something, where shallow introspection could just look at the shell, env, etc. and refer to what was previously found? (just an idea)
Thanks OpenAI!
2 Comments
Some improvements in https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/261, but we will accept more improvements for sure!
Thanks for the feedback! Please try the latest version of Codex CLI, as we're focusing on cross-platform stability and improved context awareness in our new Rust implementation. If the issue persists, we'd appreciate further details or contributions to the
codex-rs/implementation. You can find more information about our updates here.