write only sandbox doesn't work inside a container

Open 💬 3 comments Opened May 20, 2026 by purpleidea

What version of Codex CLI is running?

codex-cli 0.131.0

What subscription do you have?

pro

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.5

What platform is your computer?

Fedora Linux 43

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

bash

Codex doctor report

What issue are you seeing?

I'm running codex to try and avoid annoying approvals for writes in the workspace:

codex --sandbox workspace-write --ask-for-approval untrusted

If I ask it to write a TEST file I see:

Would you like to make the following edits? Reason: command failed; retry without sandbox?

And if I do yes, codex often writes python scripts that just write to files. This is completely insane and is wasting a ton of tokens.

I'm running codex inside of a podman container, so I suspect the nested bwrap is conflicting. I do NOT want to run privileged because I don't want to give codex more perms. I do want it to write normally as if I had disabled the inner sandbox. I don't want to disable the sandbox for anything other than file writes.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Open codex cli inside a podman container by running: codex --sandbox workspace-write --ask-for-approval untrusted. Ask it to write a TEST file.

What is the expected behavior?

It should just work without a sandbox error. It should ask me for permission though if I've set to untrusted.

Additional information

NOTE: This used to work just fine, but broke in some recent update within the last 2 months or less I believe.

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